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Lilo Linke a ’Spirit of insubordination’ autobiography as
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Lilo Linke: A ‘Spirit of Insubordination’
Autobiography as Emancipatory Pedagogy;
A Turkish Case Study
Anita Judith Ogurlu
Humanities & Cultural Studies
Birkbeck College, University of London
Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, February 2016
I hereby declare that the thesis is my own work.
Anita Judith Ogurlu
16 February 2016
2
Abstract
This thesis examines the life and work of a little-known interwar period German writer
Lilo Linke. Documenting individual and social evolution across three continents, her
self-reflexive and autobiographical narratives are like conversations with readers in the
hope of facilitating progressive change. With little tertiary education, as a self-fashioned
practitioner prior to the emergence of cultural studies, Linke’s everyday experiences
constitute ‘experiential learning’ (John Dewey). Rejecting her Nazi-leaning family,
through ‘fortunate encounter[s]’ (Goethe) she became critical of Weimar and cultivated
hope by imagining and working to become a better person, what Ernst Bloch called
Vor-Schein. Linke’s ‘instinct of workmanship’, ‘parental bent’ and ‘idle curiosity’ was
grounded in her inherent ‘spirit of insubordination’, terms borrowed from Thorstein
Veblen. Experiences and writing these experiences up resembles Paulo Freire’s
pedagogy ‘word=work=praxis’. Devoid of scientific or colonial gaze, she learned a new
way of seeing, what Goethe called ‘tender empiricism’. I argue Linke’s praxis is an
emancipatory pedagogy that worked toward betterment of the self and ‘common man’
(Veblen).
This interdisciplinary research revisits a question Veblen broadly investigated regarding
individual and social evolution at the turn of the twentieth century. My primary question
asks; how did Lilo Linke evolve from a ‘self-regarding’ individual to ‘other-regarding’
person to work for the betterment of the whole? The thesis comprises two parts. Part I
interprets Linke’s evolution evoking the Bildungsroman (Goethe). Using Veblen’s
cumulative causation methodology, I explore German ‘native-bias’ by juxtaposing it to
Linke’s ‘spirit of insubordination.’ Part II selects Linke’s authorship (1937) on the
modern Turkish Republic in its Étatist era and addresses my secondary question; how
did Linke’s praxis reflect in her narratives on Turkey? I suggest there are strong
parallels between Linke’s ‘experiential learning’ and ‘spirit of insubordination’ within
Turkey, in that, they both worked for betterment of the whole under exceedingly trying
circumstances.
3
Contents
Acknowledgements
5
Abbreviations
6
Chapter 1:
Introduction
7
Part I: Who is Lilo Linke?
Chapter 2
Embracing Life: From Hunger to Hope
36
Chapter 3
‘Fortunate Encounter[s]’: A Chance to Learn
61
Chapter 4
‘Spirit of Insubordination’: An Emancipatory Praxis
87
Part II: What Did She Write?
Chapter 5
Empire to Republic: A Journey Across Civilization
114
Chapter 6
‘Idle Curiosity’: The Turkish Case
140
Chapter 7
‘Instinct of Workmanship’: The Turkish Case
166
Chapter 8
‘Parental Bent’: The Turkish Case
191
Chapter 9
In Lieu of a Conclusion: Learning from Lilo
215
Appendix
She Who Laughed
227
Bibliography
232
4
Acknowledgements
Before all, I would like to thank my supervisor Esther Leslie for her utmost patience
and diligence in supporting me throughout this four-year adventure to bring Lilo Linke
out of the shadows and into the light. I am forever grateful that Esther introduced me to
Goethe (a self-declared Spinozan) and his method of ‘tender empiricism’ not only as a
new way of seeing but also as a science for life. I extend sincere thanks to my viva
examiners İştar Gözaydın, Çiğdem Esin and Caroline Knowles.
Although not involved in my thesis project, I send a message of appreciation to my
former professors at Istanbul Bilgi University, whose lectures I vividly recall, when I
decided to return to academic life as a mature student in 2005. Also former students in
my Visual Culture lectures forever gave me encouragement and support in allowing me
to learn from them, as hopefully they learned a little from me. Our reciprocal exchange
was an inspirational experience I will forever cherish.
I also forever thank my mother and father who without their loving support, I could
have never managed to undertake this project. Their tireless and selfless labor on the
land in an isolated, rural community gave me a chance to experience a relatively ‘Live
and Let Live’ way of life that has shaped my sense of being, in that, I will forever have
the ability to know the rural and urban pattern. Our Norwegian, Icelandic, German and
Ukrainian Canadian neighbors helped link me to Thorstein Veblen in another time and
space. In loving memory, I wish to thank Michael and Muriel Ivanochko and Anne
Romaniuk for giving me some idea that there was a higher goal to be reached through
education. I also extend my gratitude to Bob and Liz Ivanochko who kept this spirit
alive in the next generation in our family. I hope Diane will read this work one day and
share it with her children, such that they will appreciate, value and respect other
cultures’ dignity and learn that, others too, want to live in peace; ‘Live and Let Live’.
It is not enough to read a book about a place. One must go and live it!
On the journeys I took in search of Lilo’s trace, I thank those who helped me along the
way in Ecuador, Germany and France. In London, Andreas and Eric made my stay in
their home, a home, and allowed me to sense their German culture. Thank you to an old
university friend who coached me. Thank you to the Turks in London who allowed me
to sense their Turkish roots with British branches. Thank you to my Turkish neighbors
in Istanbul who fed me in times of great duress while writing up this thesis.
I am forever grateful to several key ‘fortunate encounters’ that put me on an
evolutionary journey to embrace love and knowledge as a means of hope out of the
darkness. And finally, I want to thank the people of Turkey, who through infinite
encounters shared with them, taught me and continue to teach me the Turkish pattern,
another culture and another way of seeing and being; our ‘difference in sameness’.
Thank you for your love, patience and endless ‘spirit of insubordination’.
5
Abbreviations
Works
AA
Andean Adventure
AD
Allah Dethroned: A Journey Through Modern Turkey
CAV
Cancel All Vows
JN1
Journey From the North, vol. 1
RD
Restless Days: A German Girl’s Autobiography
SCT
Social Changes in Turkey
TWE
Tale Without End
WIF
Wo ist Fred?
6
—Chapter 1—
Introduction
But in fact men are good and virtuous because of three
things. These are nature, habit or training, reason.
—Aristotle, The Politics (1962: 284)
I believe that the social sciences can be reinvigorated by the
careful application of Darwinian principles.
—Geoffrey Hodgson (2006: 109)
This thesis researches the life and authorship of a little-known interwar period German
writer and progenitor of social justice Lilo Linke (1906-1963). With little tertiary
education, as a self-fashioned practitioner prior to the emergence of cultural studies,
Linke’s experiences and writing up these experiences constitute learning by doing.
When read in totality, her rich oeuvre touches on themes such as economy, politics,
media, war, hunger, emotion, revolution, evolution, resistance, inflation, labor, dress,
consumerism, industrialization, the environment, health care, family, gender and
religion, across the three continents she journeyed; Europe, Asia and Latin America.
The study places her in each cultural and sociological context she lived and experienced
to understand better the forces that acted upon her. I propose Linke might have evolved
from a ‘self-regarding’ individual to ‘other-regarding’ person, in the way Thorstein
Veblen posed humans have an instinct to work for common good of the whole. Her
praxis, in the sense of Brazilian philosopher and pedagogue Paulo Freire (1970/1996),
might be two-fold: (social) work with ‘common man’1 across cultures and word to
enlighten and emancipate the reader, what I underscore in this thesis as, autobiography
as emancipatory pedagogy.
Little thorough scholarship exists on Linke. Karl Holl (1987) conducted an
investigation of her life—briefly touching on some of her authorship—with the hope
this might serve as material for a later biography on Linke. Sabine Wenhold, a student
of Holl, in a 2011 journal article framed Linke an economic journalist with Gustav
Stolper as her mentor. This followed with a master thesis positioning Linke as a ‘Neue
1
Veblen’s use of the term is not gender specific.
7
Frau’ drawing on Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity (Wenhold 2012). In 2006 Nicole
Brunnhuber included Linke with writers Ernest Borneman, Robert Neumann, Ruth
Feiner and George Tabori. Focusing on several of Linke’s European narratives she
asserts that Linke turned a ‘vacuous space of exile into the venue in which to launch a
literary career’ (2005: 161). In listing her oeuvre, Brunnhuber curiously left out her
Turkish autobiography. While Brunnhuber called Linke an ‘everyday hero’, to which I
agree, she missed the full potential of Linke’s oeuvre. Categorizing her an exile writer
might be inadequate, in that, Linke rejected the term ‘exile’ probably for a similar
reason Hannah Arendt rejected the term refugee. ‘We don’t like to be called refugees.
[…] ‘If we are saved we feel humiliated, and if we are helped we feel degraded. We
fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies...’ (1994: 114).
Andean scholars working on land reform, labour and indigenous issues still cite Linke’s
Latin American work (Ibarra 2010, 2011). And so the implication of this is that she is
not just an exile but part of a society. Recently, Linke was cited in Becoming Turkish
(2013), a study on early Republican Turkey by Hale Yılmaz. There has been no
substantial study on Linke’s Turkish narratives, which is one of the reasons I feature
them as a case study in Part II of the thesis.
My research draws largely but not exclusively from Linke’s autobiographies.
This is supplemented with the autobiography of novelist and activist Margaret Storm
Jameson, (hereafter Jameson) and the thesis also considers more recent work on her.
The biography of Gustav Stolper, written by his wife Toni, is a useful source (1979)
along with her memoir (1989). A Left liberal, Gustav was a prominent DDP (Deutsche
Demokratische Partei) member in the Reichstag and economic journalist. Stolper and
Joseph Schumpeter founded the reputable economic journal Der Deutsche Volkswirt in
1926, featuring a strong roster of European intellects across diverse academic fields.
Although Gustav, Toni, Margaret and Lilo shared a close-knit, life-long friendship, their
correspondence is somewhat limited. Jameson burnt most of her letters before her death
and Toni censored Linke’s private letters to her husband, with whom Linke had a love
affair, leaving scant information on their relationship. World War Two and the
consequent split up of Linke’s circle—her family in Berlin, the Stolper’s in the United
States, Jameson in England and Lilo in Ecuador—limits what might have been richer
correspondence. Linke’s few possessions in her Ecuadorian home that might have
enriched the thesis were destroyed or went missing following her early and sudden
death in 1963. Holl’s research findings on Linke in Ecuador helped place her activities
in Latin America. In 2012 I visited Quito, Ecuador in search of her trace. Those closest
8
to Linke had died, even some just recently. I did, however, interview people familiar
with her generation and circle and this helped further ground Linke in a Latin American
context. In 2013 I visited some of the places Linke journeyed to and wrote of, including
Marseille and Isle-de-Batz, a tiny island off the coastal town of Roscoff, France. The
BBC archives, the British Library and Chatham House Library proved fruitful to locate
Linke’s BBC radio scripts and correspondence with British publishers. Her 1935
Turkish experiences speak naturally to my own, after settling in Istanbul, Turkey in
1993 where I continue to live.
Linke, in her time, was somewhat known to English-speaking readers and some
non-English speakers as well. Some of her stories were published in Chinese (1936) and
Japanese (1953). Beginning with her first autobiography Tale Without End (1934) (Fig.
1), M. D. S. of The Manchester Guardian wrote: ‘Miss Linke writes as a young German
wayfarer, spiritual child of the Weimar Republic’ (1934). Thanks to Jameson
introducing her to Alfred Knopf, an American publisher in London, she received
international recognition. The New York Times printed a portrait photograph of Linke
and columnist Harold Strauss praised her story on France. ‘Lilo Linke’s Well-Written
Story of a Year’s Impressionable Wandering Gives the Effect of Springing Straight
From Life’ (1934). Strauss congratulated Linke on her second autobiography Restless
Days: A German Girl’s Autobiography (1935). ‘In Lilo Linke’s own telling the quest of
youth for new ideals becomes passionate, vivid, dramatic. […] There are many writers
born to the English tongue who could learn much about the resources of their own
language from this German girl who uses it by adoption’ (Strauss 1935). Linke’s
translation of Wolfgang Langhoff’s Rubber Truncheon: Thirteen Months in a German
Concentration Camp (1935) was reviewed in the New York Times (MacDonald 1935).
He draws parallels between Soviet and German prison camps but makes no reference to
Linke as the translator. When Allah Dethroned: A Journey Through Modern Turkey
(1937) was published, the New York Times ran a near full-page article headlined: ‘Lilo
Linke’s Vivid Panorama of Turkey in Transition’ (Woods 1937). British publisher
Constable & Co. advertised Linke’s books alongside those of Naomi Mitchison,
Bernard Shaw, Philip Lindsay and Reg Groves.
Post-WWII the political focus of statesman and the public alike shifted to
rebuilding Europe, causing Linke’s popularity to wane. Nevertheless interest in her
authorship continued in Latin America. Magic Yucatan: A Journey Remembered (1950)
[Yucatán Mágico: Recuerdos de un Viaje (1957)] (Fig. 7) was well received and used
copies turn up as far off as Buenos Aires. Other works include Andean Adventure: A
9
Social and Political Study of Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia (1945); Viaje por una
revolución, [Journey into a Revolution (1956)] documentation of the tin-miners struggle
to nationalize the mines in Bolivia; Ecuador: Country of Contrasts (1954)
commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and People of
the Amazon (1963). Additionally, she wrote over two thousand articles in Spanish for a
sociology column granted by the editor of Ecuador’s liberal newspaper El Comerico.2
Linke wrote for Latin American journals Américas and La Hacienda. She continued
writing the odd article for the New York Times like ‘Ecuador’s Island Resort’ (1956)
and ‘Industry Comes Late to Ecuador’ (1957). Linke’s only German work, Wo ist Fred?
[Where is Fred? (1965)], written for German youth was published posthumously.
Linke experienced WWI, the November Revolution, Inflation, Turkey’s
modernization under Atatürk, European and British fascism, rising Nazism in Germany,
WWII, the Ecuadorian–Peruvian War and Ecuador’s right-wing governance under
President Valesco Ibarra. An untimely death, at just fifty-six, ended her journey. Never
hard-pressed for experiences—an extraordinary milieu of political, economic and
cultural upheaval—Linke was fortunate to survive. A non-Jewish German who was
skeptical of communism but, as she put it, ‘knew that the truth must lie somewhere in
that direction’ left Berlin in 1933 (RD 363). She would start her life three times over.
‘Fortunate encounters’ helped steer her clear of fascism to embrace knowledge as a
means of hope. In search of the ‘truth’ through writing her experiences, Linke set out to
reshape facts, fallaciously presented in her epoch. Linke journeyed across France in
1932, Britain from 1933 to 1934, one year across Turkey in 1935, returned to Britain in
1936, took several extended journeys to Paris in 1937 and 1938, and visited Holland
and Italy. In 1939, Linke arrived in Colon, Panama, gradually crossing the Andean
heartland of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia, to settle in the mountain top bird’s
nest of peace, Quito, Ecuador, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1945. After WWII, she
journeyed to Mexico in 1946, visited England five or six times and Germany several
times but always returned to Ecuador. Linke worked endlessly for social justice for the
marginalized poor and working class. Her social work in Latin America included
literacy, hygiene, midwifery, children’s puppet theatre, unionization of journalists,
agriculture and reforestation projects. In Calderon north Quito, Linke funded a ‘Radio
School’ that later became the Escuela Fiscal Mixta Lilo Linke in the early 1960s (Fig.
8) providing education to boys and girls five to twelve years of age from working-class
families (Fig. 9). With her authorship in English, Spanish and German, Linke was an
2
Letter from Lilo Linke to Toni Stolper, 17 December 1950 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
10
international soul, fluent in English, French, Spanish, some Turkish and Quechua.
Author of over ten books—five of which are autobiographies—short stories, articles in
journals and newspapers, BBC radio talks and over two-thousand newspaper articles in
Spanish, Linke used her time purposefully, working for betterment of the whole.
The thesis is grounded in the disciplines of sociology and cultural studies. I use
cultural studies for the possibility to capture nuanced social and cultural formations’ and
‘native bias’, peculiar to each culture. Lawrence Grossberg offers the conjuncture in
cultural studies—which is ‘always plural’ (2010: 25)—needs to include politics and
economy and culture, in order to revive the discipline because not only the humanities
but also knowledge itself is in crisis (p. 179). He criticizes,
what have become the rigidities and common sense of political and intellectual life, including
the ease with which we substitute concepts for empirical work, the cynicism with which we
approach or reject too many ideas because of their sources, or the automatic privilege we give,
intellectually and politically, to the marginalized. I am discouraged by how easy it seems to be
for cultural studies to become disconnected from the very real political questions and challenges
that the world places before us as intellectuals, or to withdraw from our responsibility of
questioning the questions themselves (p. 66).
Research on European individuals in non-European nations might be expected to draw
from postcolonial theory. I have chosen not to pursue this route. First, my case study
focuses on Turkey, a nation that was never colonized. Second, I am skeptical of postcolonial theory for similar reasons as Arıf Dirlik (1994); namely that post-colonial
discourse reproduces colonialism. Returning to Grossberg, he argues cultural studies
must locate ‘possibilities of survival, struggle, resistance and change’ (p. 8) espoused as
the ‘moral courage to criticize’ (p. 66). Karen Barkey echoes Grossberg’s concerns.
Cultural studies have gone too far in the direction of ignoring the basic structural determinants of
social change, political institutions, and socioeconomic structures that are so important in light
of the tremendous political and socio-economic transformations of the global world today (2008:
4).
Considering these points, I have been cautious not to burden the thesis with economic
and political institutions but rather interweave Linke in them, and reciprocally, them in
Linke. Today, her narratives across geographies, nations and cultures, might be a
counter narrative to the dominant narrative of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of
civilizations’ put forth in 1996 (2003). Linke’s German narrative may contribute to
scholarship on Weimar suffering economic collapse. Molly Loberg (2013), discussing
resistance to the American model of mass consumerism in Weimar, stresses there is
scant literature on individual experience during crisis. ‘Neither the scholarship on
Germany nor the broader transnational studies have fully integrated periods of
11
economic and political crisis’ (p. 366). Thus, rather than post-colonial or literary theory,
I frame the thesis employing the theories of Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929).
Like Marx, Veblen too, wanted to change the world. Neither historian nor
anthropologist, as a radical realist, Veblen drew from Charles Darwin’s theory of
evolution borrowing his ideas about instincts but he was critical of Darwin’s
mechanistic approach. Frustrated with sociologists in his day for grounding research in
statistics, as a social scientist he studied cause and effect, developing a cumulative
causation methodology to understand why individuals and societies behave in certain
ways. This thesis does not write a cultural history but rather cultural evolution. No one
doubts that we evolve, allegedly through progress and civilization, but the question
arises, into what kind of beings do we evolve and under what pressures? Do we evolve
toward constructing a better world or do we evolve toward pecuniary gain, and if so,
whose pecuniary gain, and at what cost to humanity?
Pyotr Kropotkin (1842-1921), a follower of Darwin, articulated a concept he
called ‘mutual aid’ where humans, like animals, do not engage in prolonged
competition but rather aid each other to ensure survival of the species.
The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all
the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present
time notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace
and prosperity; but then even the greatest calamities befell men—when whole countries were
laid waste by wars, and whole populations were decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke
of tyranny—the same tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes in
the towns; it still kept them together, and in the long run it reacted even upon those ruling,
fighting, and devastating minorities which dismissed it as sentimental nonsense (1902/1987:
180).
Dugger (1984) claims there are strong parallels between Kropotkin and Veblen’s work.
An interdisciplinary scholar, Veblen drew knowledge from economy, politics,
sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, philosophy and literature, even folktales.3
Studying diverse cultures and world religions he treated Judaism, Christianity and Islam
even-handedly. Veblen was fiercely critical of corporate America. He hardly fit the
stereotype on an American. A Norwegian immigrant, modest, soft-spoken and
hardworking, he was fluent in five languages. He kept abreast of Europe, in particular
Marxist Werner Sombart and the German Historical School of Economics under the
direction of Gustav von Schmoller. Veblen appreciated their holism and Darwinist
approach to institutions that rejected Adam Smith’s isolated individual (Dugger 1979:
430). Stolper included Veblen’s Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915)
3
Veblen translated the thirteenth century Icelandic folktale Laxdæla Saga into English in 1925.
12
as essential reading for Linke and his readers, an indication he was familiar with this
work (1940: 277).
Veblen wrote on diverse subjects such as culture, technology, industry, business
ideology, labor, institutions, women’s dress, consumerism, media and war, leading
Stjepan Meštrović to call him a ‘Dostoyevsky of cultural studies’ (2003) and Michael
Spindler the ‘American Gramsci’ (2002). Veblen supported first-wave feminism.
Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) saw him a kindred spirit, whose work was ‘illuminated by
the most brilliant penetrating satire I ever saw’ (Gilman 1999: 705). A wayfaring man,
fiercely critical of higher education under the strong hand of businessmen, he drifted
from university to university. Nevertheless, he founded the New School (1919) in New
York with John Dewey and other academics. Today, Veblen is largely kept out of
academia. According to Michael Hudson, ‘Veblen’s exclusion from today’s curriculum
is part of the reaction against classical political economy’s program of social reform’
(2015: 132). Geoffrey Hodgson believes Veblen’s corpus of work has been highly
misunderstood (2006). For instance, Theodor Adorno accused him of being the
‘opponent of aesthetics who attacked culture’ and also a ‘proponent of technological
determinism’ (Simich and Tilman 1980: 632). He was criticized for ‘technocratic
elitism’ (Bell 1963; Dobriansky 1957; Riesman 1953; Rutherford 1992). On the
contrary, Joachim Schumacher, writing to Ernst Bloch on 11 September 1937,
mentioned the following:
There is a certain Thorsten Veblen who is completely unknown in Europe, however, he has a lot
more to say than most of our domestic people in this field [sociology]; Particularly in terms of
specific challenges and materials they offer (Schumacher cited in Karola Bloch 1985: 520-521).
Rather than ‘technological determinism’ Veblen offered that industry, when managed
by engineers and common man with a genuine concern for community good, would
finally be freed from the fetters of absentee ownership that use production for pecuniary
gain. Rational and efficient production could lift common man out of poverty by
producing the essential goods needed. American literary critic Alfred Kazin regarded
Veblen an artist, arguing that his ‘learning became a series of illustrations by which to
‘prove’ that the warrior of barbarism, had given way to the priest and noble of
feudalism only to yield in turn to the trader, the financier and the industrialist’ (1942:
179). Realist writer Henry James read him as a ‘restless analyst’ (Martha Banta cited in
Veblen 2009: viii).
Few scholars are familiar with Veblen today. At best they know The Theory of
the Leisure Class (1899/2009). Veblen wrote many books. Using sarcasm and a
13
labyrinthine writing style, perhaps to avoid censorship in the United States,4 Veblen is
not easy reading. Ahmet Öncü (2009) suggests if we read Veblen like Althusser
proposed we read Marx—for a problematique or series of questions answering a larger
question—we locate in Veblen’s corpus rich theory as valid today as a century ago. For
Hodgson, ‘Veblen consistently tried to reconcile a notion of individual purposefulness
(or sufficient reason) with his materialist idea of causality (or efficient cause)’ (2006:
111). For Öncü his problematique questions how human beings evolve from otherregarding to self-regarding (2009). Dugger and Sherman claim this process causes
conflict in an individuals ‘instincts’ (2000: 149).
Writing on social change in Turkey, Linke posed an astute question, putting it
this way. ‘It might be interesting for the scientist to find out in how far all of us live in
two contradictory worlds, and at what moment we become conscious of the fact and
draw conclusions’ (SCT 546). In posing this question, Linke prompted my research
question. Beginning with what might appear two rather generic questions; Who is Lilo
Linke? and What Did She Write? that shape the dissertation into two parts, the thesis
opens out to explore the question Veblen already posed in The Theory of the Leisure
Class (1899/2009). Why do human beings, who work with purposeful intent for
common good (other-regarding), evolve into predatory agents (self-regarding),
inhibiting common good of the whole? The premise is that the opposite evolution
occurred in Linke. I twist the question around to ask: How did Lilo Linke evolve from a
‘self-regarding’ individual to ‘other-regarding’ person to work for betterment of the
whole? Certainly she lived in two contradictory worlds. War, hunger and deprivation,
on the one hand, and mass consumer abundance on the other. I want to examine at what
point, as she put it, one becomes ‘conscious of the fact and draw conclusions’. Here, I
read ‘drawing conclusions’ as awareness. Awareness I read as critical. Irit Rogoff calls
it ‘criticality’ whereby she states ‘living out something while being able to see through
it’ (2012). I want to explore and understand why, as a non-Jewish German, Linke didn’t
subordinate to Nazism when her family, in fact, did? What did Linke experience, what
did she feel, in as much as she relates this, and whom did she encounter, in Prussia and
Weimar, that changed her and set her on a journey in search of truth through knowing.
Raised in a dreary working class neighborhood in the east of Berlin, each new
day brought war, class warfare, revolution, hunger and feelings of inferiority and envy,
to name but a few. I suggest, Linke came to meet, hear, suffer, understand and learn—
knowing through experience—or what in German is termed Erfahren. ‘[B]lessing lies in
4
The Frankfurt School later learned the term Marxism is not permitted by authorities in the United States.
14
hard work and not in gold’, wrote Walter Benjamin. ‘Such lessons in experience were
passed on to us, either as threats or as kindly pieces of advice, all the while we were
growing up: “Still wet behind the ears, and he wants to tell us what’s what!” “You’ll
find out [erfahren] soon enough!” (1933/1999: 731). Having lived through WWI, when
Linke came of working age in the early 1920s, coinciding with the hyperinflation in
Weimar, she soon learned there was little work or gold. Perhaps these contradictions
might have aroused a curiosity to ask what was happening to herself and to her society.
‘The meanings of such words as soul, mind, self, unity, even body, are hardly more than
condensed epitomes of mankind’s age-long efforts at interpretation of its experience’
(Dewey 2008: 323).
Although the kernel of ‘knowing’ may lie in experiences, experiences don’t
happen in a void. Experiences are grounded in a culture that cumulatively possesses a
‘native bias’, peculiar to each; a cumulative ‘psychological inheritance’ as the
‘solidarity of inheritance within the group so designated’ (Veblen 1915/1964: 4).
Peoples, societies and cultures each live in their respective habituation. Veblen defined
habit and habituation as follows:
[Ha]bit takes on more of a cumulative character, in that the habitual acquirements of the race are
handed on from one generation to the next, by tradition, training, education, or whatever general
term may best designate that discipline of habituation by which the young acquire what the old
have learned (p. 38-39).5
We might also call habituation, habitual and habit a kind of ‘social character’ of a
culture. While some contemporary sociologists claim ‘social character’ nonsociological
and politically incorrect (Meštrović 1993: x) it should be noted Ferdinand Tönnies
explored the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft in Germany, where Georg Simmel
continued along this vein, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s ‘habits of the heart of a people’
explored facets of social evolution in America. Benjamin wrote it himself. ‘Such
lessons in experience were passed on to us’ as advice or threats. Veblen believed
humans learn by ‘habituation rather than by precept and reflection’ (1919/1964: 15). We
learn from what we habitually do and see around us. John Dewey put it this way,
if our American culture is largely a pecuniary culture, it is not because the original or innate
structure of human nature tends of itself to obtaining pecuniary profit. It is rather that a complex
culture stimulates, promotes and consolidates native tendencies so as to produce a certain matter
of desires and purposes (1938-39/2008: 76).
In this sense, humans are creatures of cumulative habit. But Veblen also underscored
humans have instincts: the ‘instinct of workmanship’ (1914/1964: 27), ‘parental bent’
5
Veblen uses race and means thereby the human race.
15
(p. 94) and ‘idle curiosity’ (p. 85) that he later loosely grouped as a ‘spirit of
insubordination’ (1915/1964: 158). Humans have an instinct for purposeful work. Care
for children, is extended to care for others, a stronger trait in women, because men, for
Veblen, tend to be predatory.6 And humans are curious, after basic needs are met, to
know about life. ‘He [Veblen] retained the idea that persons were purposeful’ (Hodgson
2006: 111). But ‘[a]ll instinctive behavior is subject to development and hence to
modification by habit’ (Veblen 1914/1964: 38). Purposeful instincts are susceptible to
contamination by habit. ‘Human deliberation and habits of thought are shaped by the
social culture. But “it is only by the prompting of instinct” that human cognition and
deliberation come into play. Instincts help to spur emotions that drive many of our
actions and deliberations’ (Hodgson 2006: 113). Consumerism is a habit that reinforces
self-regarding in social culture. Because habits are learned and not instinctual they can
shape humans positively or adversely. Advances in the industrial arts (technology), and
for what purposes industry is used, largely direct human evolution for Veblen. Hence, I
offer, based on my reading of Veblen, humans have as much potential to be peaceable
and industrious (instinctively) as they do to be predatory and war-like (habitually). The
outcome largely depends on each social culture’s cumulative habit and habituation that
constitute their ‘native bias’. For instance, if a social culture becomes habituated to the
vested interests enterprise of ‘land-grabbing’ and wealth accumulation through
armament trade, these habits will direct how this culture will continue to evolve, only
worsening it, as it evolves or drifts further in that direction. Rather than collective work,
because common man doesn’t control industry, they are inclined to shift and become
selfish beings because industrial output steers them in that direction.
By the turn of the twentieth century ‘corporation finance’ and ‘Big Business’
6
Human psychology retains traits from earlier stages based on the distinction of work activity between
men and women. Men fight and hunt (exploit) while women do menial work, picking up after the hunt
(drudgery). Believing himself civilized in modern times, in actuality, he carries in his psychology, as
habits of thought, a distinction between work that is exploit and work that is drudgery. With the rise of
the modern industrial system, the distinction evolved to industry versus exploit. ‘Industry’ is the effort
to create new things that have a purpose to benefit life. ‘Exploit’ is conversion of the energies of others
to ones own end (1899/2009:14). Industry cumulatively is seen as manual, dirty, unworthy and inferior.
Exploit cumulatively is seen as honorific, noble, worthy and superior. Categorized further into
industrial and non-industrial employment, it works out on a class basis. In the higher stages of
barbarian culture these two classes are the Leisure class (p. 7) and the inferior class (p. 8). The leisure
class is noble and priestly. Under a division of labour non-industrial employment is politics, war,
sports, learning and priestly office (p. 9). The inferior class is industrial labour—industry and all
practices that constitute livelihood for existence (p. 8). The leisure class is an institution (p. 7) evolved
out of the distinction of employment judged worthy or unworthy. The distinction is arcane in industrial
modern times yet this earlier preconception still directs a personal understanding between superiority
and inferiority. ‘Such employments as warfare, politics, public worship, and public merry-making, are
felt, in the popular apprehension to differ intrinsically from the labour that has to do with elaborating
the material means of life’ (p. 12).
16
became the ‘New Order’ (1923/1964: 211) what Veblen calls the Vested Interests. ‘A
vested interest is a marketable right to get something for nothing. […] Vested interests
are immaterial wealth, intangible assets’ based on three premises of businesslike
management: a) limitation of supply; b) obstruction of traffic; c) meretricious publicity.7
All three secure profitable sales (1919/1964: 100). The new order runs on the ‘masters
of financial intrigue’ (p. 89). While ‘industry’ is the effort to create new things that have
a purpose to benefit life, ‘exploit’ is the conversion of the energies of others to ones
own end (1899/2009:14). These business principles are the new ‘exploit’. Small-scale
industry of purposeful work to serve community good, evolved into industry for profit,
serving vested interests. The vested interests are absentee landlords, corporate
financiers, bankers, speculators and politicians, that include the clergy, military, courts,
police and legal professions (1919/1964: 163). Staunch supporters of law and order, the
latter secure the ‘free income’ of the kept classes. Kept classes live off the labour of the
inferior class Veblen calls common man.
Contrasted with these classes who make up the vested interests, and who derive an income from
the established order of ownership and privilege, is the common man. […] He is common in the
respect that he is not vested with such a prescriptive right to get something for nothing. And he
is called common because such is the common lot of men under the new order of business and
industry (p. 162).
Veblen further defined division between the classes as follows.
The three conventionally recognized classes, upper, middle, and lower, are all and several
pecuniary categories; the upper being typically that (aristocratic) class which is possessed of
wealth without having worked or bargained for it; while the middle class have come by their
holdings through some form of commercial (business) traffic; and the lower class gets what it
has by workmanship. It is a gradation of (a) predation, (b) business, (c) industry; the former
being disserviceable and gainful, the second gainful, and the third serviceable (1914/1964: 184).
Common man is ‘helpless within the rules of the game’ (1919/1964: 163). The division
between the vested interests and common man is a division between ‘those who control
the conditions of work and the rate and volume of output and to whom the net output of
industry goes as free income […] and those others who have the work to do and to
whom a livelihood is allowed by these persons in control’ (p. 161). Industry became a
‘means of making money, not of making goods’ (1923/1964: 85). The former
distinction of work—esteem of the craftsman to craft a good—was contaminated on two
accounts: the price system of labour and the institution of the Leisure class of
‘pecuniary culture’ (1899/2009: 24). Work as a means of self-esteem shifted to work for
a standard of living. However, once the basic needs are met, common man is prone to
7
a) slowed production keeping prices high; b) business inter-rivalry; c) advertising and salesmanship.
17
emulate the class just above them because this ‘desire to excel in pecuniary standing
and so gain the esteem and envy of one’s fellow-men’ becomes a ‘habit of pecuniary
emulation’ (p. 26). In short, industry directs the habit of pecuniary emulation by
producing endless goods to purchase and display to others. In short, this works out to
mass consumerism. This becomes the habit of ‘invidious comparison’ a technical term
Veblen used whereby ‘a comparison of persons with a view to rating and grading them
in respect of relative worth or value—in an aesthetic or moral sense’ is learned (p. 27).
‘An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect to worth’ (p.
27). These learned modes of behavior rest in what Veblen terms the institution of the
Leisure Class. This institution, par excellence for Veblen, means unfettered ownership.
He does not mean small-scale ownership but absentee ownership. He includes Negro
slavery (1923/1964: 169); the country town (p. 170); enterprise of ‘land-grabbing’ (p.
187); and Gerontocracy (1914/1964: 42) as institutions. Institutions are cumulative
habits that have come to be culturally taken for granted in social culture.
In the early 1920s German social culture was confronted by the impersonal
modus operandi of ‘business-as-usual’ profiteers—‘getting something for nothing’
(American native bias)8 profiting from hyperinflation and American-style capitalism
making serious inroads into Weimar. The thesis will explore how Linke and German
youth responded or might have possibly resisted. For Linke some resented being forced
into a ‘business-shape’ (RD 181). This had ramifications for common man in Weimar.
For instance, Moritz Föllmer draws attention to rates of suicide9 that in ‘urban
modernity’ was ‘an individual’s answer to capitalist exploitation or personal drama’
(2009: 195). Mass unemployment and welfare cuts seem to have played a role (p. 196).
In the early 1920s, Berlin with its ‘confrontational political climate’ was particularly
affected (p. 198). ‘Berliners would sleep on their sofas, deliberately ignoring the
impending doom surrounding them’, what Föllmer refers to as ‘bourgeois indifference’
while blaming the ‘Republican “system”’ (p. 201). His discussion of German attitudes
to suicide provides several examples. Some viewed suicide a result of the ‘Young
Plan’s dire consequences’ (p. 202) or that ‘capitalism was ultimately irreconcilable with
8
American ‘native bias’ originated in the country town proprietor monopolies; grocer, hardware store,
repair shop, etc. Capital from these businesses was invested in speculative land prices. He serves ‘joint
pecuniary interest’ (p. 335). He becomes habituated to ‘getting something for nothing at the expense of
the foreign immigrants’ (p. 335). Hailed a ‘meritorious citizen’ he enters politics as a senator, and
extends his habit of speculation, land and stock (stock market capitalism), globally. Thus, ‘American
business is eminently of a financial character, and the traffic of these financiers runs within the closed
circuit of money-market strategy [...] the final discretion vests in the investment banker, not in the
engineering staff or the manager of the works’ (Veblen 1915/1964: 339).
9
‘In 1932 there were 85 suicides per million inhabitants in Great Britain, 133 in the United States, and
155 in France. In Germany there were 260’ (p. 196).
18
human life’ (p. 203). ‘A small businessman saw himself ruined by the “decline of our
economy, unfair competition, and high taxes”’ (p. 210). A former prison guard and
doorman wanted to prevent the welfare office from forcing him to work for his
unemployment benefits. He stated, ‘before I go into forced labor, I will rather disappear
to a foreign country or end my life’ (p. 211). Engineering student Wilhelm Hagemann
explained in a suicide note he was ‘overwhelmed by the expectations of, and his
obligations toward, family and friends’ (p. 211). A mother stated: ‘“youth now has no
Emperor, no god, and thus no footing anymore”’ (p. 214). School principles and
teachers often dismissed youth suicides attributing them to a ‘superficial’ or ‘dishonest’
character of the person, as was the case of a student, Heinz, who allegedly ‘received
expensive gifts from his parents, talked to his classmates about stock market
speculation, and volunteered for female roles in school plays’. Heinz was judged an
‘inauthentic person’ (p. 215).
The New Order of Big Business collided with the German ‘native bias’ of
industriousness and loyalty to the state.10 Benjamin wrote this German ‘native bias’
himself: ‘Blessing lies in hard work and not in gold’. Each social culture adapts to or
resists the scheme based on habituation cumulatively constructed into nation.
A nation is an organisation for collective offence and defence, in peace and war,—essentially
based on hate and fear of other nations; a nationality is a cultural group, bound together by
home-bred affinities of language, tradition, use and wont, and commonly also by a supposed
community race,—essentially based on sympathies and sentiments of self-complacency within
itself (Veblen 1919/1964: 147).11
Nations, therefore, live in a ‘state of habitual enmity and distrust’ (p. 130). WWI was
the result of a conflict of absentee interests between nations (Veblen 1923/1964: 3).
American style business, of which Veblen was its best reader and critic, is important
because it would be this ‘New Order’ that steamrolled across the globe,12 ultimately
affecting many of the cultures and geographies that Linke journeyed across. Elizabeth
Maslen points out that Jameson foresaw this. ‘Since World War I, she had been certain
that America would take over Britain’s old role’ (2014: 297). The ‘New Order’ would
eventually be emulated globally.
It is instructive to turn to the relationship between the new order of big business,
10
11
12
‘The German captains of industry who came to take the discretionary management in the new era were
fortunate enough not to have matriculated from the training school of a country town based on a retail
business in speculative real estate and political jobbery managed under the rule of “prehension,
division and silence”’ (Veblen 1915/1964: 193). Rather, Germans were ‘captains of industry rather
than of finance’ (p. 194). I don’t think Europeans, even today, understand this difference.
Supposed ‘community race’ is sarcasm. Veblen did not believe a nation could be a race.
Excluding USSR, China and pockets of fervent resistance against 20th century U.S. expansionism.
19
consumerism and politics in Weimar. Recent work from Julia Sneeringer (2004)
illustrates how the two are inextricably bound. Weimar’s post-inflation ‘golden’ period
was awash with advertisements from Persil detergent, the C&A fashion brand, and Fön
a hairdryer brand, to name a few, that shaped the political discourse around an alleged
democracy of choice. ‘Women! Vote for—Persil!’ appeared as a 1924 advertisement.
(p. 475). Of the explosion of advertising and political propaganda, Sneeringer
underlines advertisements were timed to air simultaneously and even support political
campaigns (p. 479). With women’s suffrage declared in November 1918, they were
perceived as consumers who could save the nation. Sneeringer provides an example of
the German People’s Party, DVP (Deutsche Volkspartei) agenda on stabilization.
DVP propaganda for the 1924 election contrasted Weimar’s early phase of “Leftist chaos” with
the present, when under DVP leadership, the government halted the “ruin” of the middle class
and “at last” a wife could properly run a household. This linkage of shopping and national
stability was intended to shut the door on a troubling time and begin the project of stabilization
(p. 479).
In 1924, C&A ran a campaign with the following claim. ‘It’s your voice/vote that
matters to us and that we strive, year in and year out, to reach’ (p. 481). Sneeringer
points to a play on the German Stimme that means both ‘voice’ and ‘vote’ (p. 480).
These tactics were not unique to the DVP. The DDP (Left-liberal) and SDP (Social
Democrats) also advocated that female consumers were needed to modernize and
promote a mass consumption economy. Even Socialists viewed mass consumption
positively (p. 486) despite the existence of strong anti-capitalist sentiment. For instance,
the German Communist Party KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) was critical
of using political campaigns for the ‘packaging and sale of parties to voter-consumers’
(p. 490). Yet, the KPD also emulated advertising by promoting products with the slogan
‘Class Struggle Cigarettes’ (p. 491). In 1924 Fön, the hairdryer brand, positioned itself
as saving the German people, airing an advertisement that read: ‘Democrat, socialist /
here völkisch, there communist / countless parties—only Fön gets my vote!’ (p. 491). In
May 1928 Leiser (shoe company) ran an advertisement that coincided with the election
results: ‘Leiser shoes have already garnered millions of votes’ (p. 493). Sneeringer
asserts advertising and consumerism ‘helped neutralize the destabilizing potential of
female political power’ where women allegedly had their voices heard (p. 496). Veblen
would have underscored it their evolution from ‘other-regarding’ to ‘self-regarding’.
Linke experienced war around her everyday. European civilization reverted to
what might be called a former stage in human evolution: barbarism. German common
man largely conceded to the vested interests because they were camouflaged as German
20
national interests. This was not unique to them. British common man was little
different. Yet instincts deep in common man, when losing their standard of living and
facing starvation, come to battle against the vested interests through strikes or what
Veblen called forms of ‘sabotage’ with workmen slowing down industrial production
(1921/2001: 5). Yet, not all of common man arrive at this realization. This brings about
a split: those coerced by the vested interests and those who are not. This caused
polarization between conservative and Left positions in Weimar (Scheck 2004).
Common man who harbor hope for a revolution direct their efforts toward this goal
while those harboring fear stick to the usual modus operandi.
Millions of men perished in WWI, leaving women to pick up the pieces. Having
experienced hunger, deprivation and the fervent resistance of the workers in her east of
Berlin neighborhood, Linke might have imagined, one day, she too would try to change
the situation. Hunger is of fundamental ‘economic interest’, wrote Ernst Bloch (1986:
67). Hunger is both an emotional and physical state. ‘It seeks to change the situation
which has caused its empty stomach, its hanging head’ (p. 75).
The No to the bad situation which exists, the Yes to the better life that hovers ahead, is
incorporated by the deprived into revolutionary interest. This interest always begins with
hunger, hunger transforms itself, having been taught, into an explosive force against the prison
of deprivation. Thus the self seeks not only to preserve itself, it becomes explosive; selfpreservation becomes self-extension (Emphasis added, p. 75-76).
For Bloch, hope rather than fear is the emotion to change the situation. ‘Hope, this
expectant counter-emotion against anxiety and fear, is therefore the most human of all
mental feelings and only accessible to men, and it also refers to the furthest and
brightest horizon’ (Emphasis added, p. 75).
The epistemology of Ernst Bloch (1885-1977) is a critical hermeneutic of
cultural history and socio-economic developments that led, he argues, to the realization
of socialism vis-à-vis emancipatory imagination found in hope. An unconventional
Marxist interested in imagination, he suggests even though ideology manipulates the
masses it also offers emancipatory possibilities. Like Veblen, Bloch placed great
emphasis on popular culture, but Bloch ferreted out of everyday life experiences, a
philosophical treatise of hope located in cultural artifacts like daydreams, popular
literature, fashion, sports and architecture. Bloch’s thinking is in stark contrast to
Veblen who equated the new industrial goods a profit-making enterprise for the vested
interests, a habit-making practice of ‘pecuniary emulation’ and ‘invidious comparison’
amongst common man.
Like Veblen, Bloch posed humans live in multi-temporality: the past, present
21
and future because they cannot clearly see the present and the past festers within them.
‘We could scarcely see a day ahead’, wrote Linke (RD 110). Yet, they project
themselves toward the future or the Not-Yet, as Bloch called it. They anticipate
something better for themselves and the world. ‘My own heart was hopeless, too, and
full of useless remorse. Oh, in the future I would try all I could to help my mother’ (RD
35). This future orientation is what Bloch called Vor-Schein thereby meaning
‘anticipatory illumination’ projected toward a better life imagined in the present. He
vehemently argued such ‘pre-appearances’ are neither escapist nor delusional but are
real visions based on a lack in the present (Bloch 1986: 150). Humans imagine
themselves on the way to becoming. Some hopeful souls imagine becoming a better
person, living in a better world working collectively with others toward this goal. This
is commensurate with Veblen’s premise that common man is a teleological ‘agent’ who
sets goals for himself with an instinct to do purposeful work. Here, Veblen differs from
Bloch’s thinking because while humans may set teleological goals for themselves, they
are also prone to revert to earlier stages in human evolution such as barbarism because
psychological traits still dwell in their present, reinforced by barbaric habits in the
present. For Veblen these barbaric habits cumulated (evolved) as an outcome of the
institution of the Leisure Class practiced as ‘pecuniary emulation’ and ‘invidious
comparison’ that are forms of modern barbarism, oddly perceived as civilized. Veblen
makes no mention of daydreams but for Bloch they are useful for future-directed
‘concrete utopias’ (Jack Zipes cited in Bloch 1996: xxvii). Art and literature also project
concrete utopias. In fact, as a young man, Veblen was influenced by Edward Bellamy’s
utopian novel Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888/2009), confirming the power of
literature to impart an ‘anticipatory illumination’ in its reader. Bellamy’s evolution over
revolution might have illuminated Veblen’s path. But Veblen also experienced,
firsthand, American corporations overtaking American common man. His theories were
written from experience. Veblen anticipated an achievable concrete utopia, namely;
modern industry run by common man for betterment of the whole over the vested
interests with no interest in industry other than for pecuniary gain. He hoped for
bloodless evolution over a bloody revolution.
In search of concrete utopias, a hopeful individual might search for others who
share the same hope, to correct the situation that causes empty stomachs. Crowds bring
people together in this. Being in the crowd for Elias Canetti means a possibility of
overcoming loneliness and fear (1960/1981: 15). ‘As soon as a man has surrendered
himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch’ (p. 16). I want to know if Linke was
22
part of the crowd or if she searched for others who shared a similar goal or worldview.
In Linke’s case, at sixteen, it seems she was touched by a ‘fortunate encounter’ to
overcome what might be feelings of fear and rejection during WWI. She admitted:
I do not know what would have become of me without Anne. […] I lived in such abnormal times
that I had seen death before I had ever seen life […] She allowed me to read her books—poems
by Rilke and Stefan George, Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit […] only by knowing Anne was I
able to understand what I read (RD 99).
Goethe, remarking on his ‘fortunate encounter’ with Schiller in 1788,
articulated, their friendship was an ‘enduring union rich in benefit to us and to others’
(1995: 20). Their encounter furthered Goethe’s philosophy. Of her chance to learn with
Anne, Linke admitted: ‘In fact, all my learning never happened in a one-and-one-istwo-way, but only in connection with a personal influence’ (RD 99). For Goethe human
evolution did not happen in a well-defined process of stages but in a series of ‘wrong
turns, twisting roads, hidden ways, and finally of the unintended jump, the energetic
leap which takes us to a higher level of understanding’. Hence, a fortunate encounter
contributes to a ‘purer, freer state of self-awareness’ (Goethe 1995: 21). My premise is
that fortunate encounters (Jameson and Stolper) established Linke as a writer. Not only
this, how might these fortunate encounters and future encounters contribute to her
learning and way of seeing?
In light of this possibility the thesis considers Goethe’s scientific method of
‘tender empiricism’, or what is termed Zarte Empirie, as a science for life. His method
suggests both observation and participation are necessary to gather more reliable
phenomena or facts for ‘true’ knowledge. Goethe observed: ‘There is a delicate [tender]
empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true
theory’ (1995: 307). Goethe likened the practice of seeing as reciprocal, in his
admittance nature (as subject) sees back. It is like inhaling and exhaling, each reliant on
the other. It underlines his idea on reciprocity between two things. Daniel Wahl
interprets Goethean science as a ‘conscious-process-participation epistemology’ arguing
it opposite to ‘subject-object-separation epistemology’ of Cartesian mechanistic
metaphors and dualistic rationalism of Newtonian materialism (2005: 70). Goethe was
critical of scientists in his epoch for collecting knowledge and using it as a form of
domination rather than science for life, which is perhaps little different to Veblen’s
annoyance with sociologists’ use of statistics to justify sociological research. Veblen too
rejected dualist Cartesian ontology (Hodgson p. 112). Critical sensibility toward science
and its use for domination also appears a concern for Freire.
23
The investigator who, in the name of scientific objectivity, transforms the organic into
something inorganic, what is becoming into what is, life into death, is a person who fears
change. […] He or she does want to study change—but in order to stop it, not in order to
stimulate or deepen it. However, in seeing change as a sign of death and in making people
passive objects of investigation in order to arrive at rigid models, one betrays their own character
as a killer of life (1970/1996: 89).
His premise seems commensurate with Goethe’s postulation, ‘when making
observations it is best to be fully conscious of objects, and when thinking to be fully
aware of ourselves’ (1995: 308). Science claims objectivity. Çiğdem Esin, questions
objectivity: ‘if we’re working with people, we’re always subjective’ (2008: 76). Esin
speaks naturally to Goethe’s claim: ‘The manifestation of a phenomenon is not detached
from the observer—it is caught up and entangled in his individuality (1995: 307).
Drawing further from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the thesis
considers his reciprocal premise ‘true reflection—leads to action’ and vice versa, an
equilibrium of activism and verbalism defined as word=work=praxis to build a better
world (1970/1996: 68). Authentic praxis is emancipatory because the ‘objective of any
true revolution—requires that the people act, as well as reflect, upon the reality to be
transformed’ (p. 111). Freire calls for a dialog of love. ‘Only dialogue, which requires
critical thinking, is also capable of generating critical thinking’ (p. 73). ‘No matter
where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause
of liberation. And this commitment, because it is loving, is dialogical’ (p. 70). Linke’s
mode of writing might resemble a series of ‘conversations’ with her readers, a view
Margaretta Jolly locates as stories ‘defined through who listens, how and for what
interest’ (2014: 10). Jennifer Birkett and Chiara Briganti edited a collection of essays on
Jameson titling the book Margaret Storm Jameson Writing in Dialogue (2007).
Jameson strongly urged writers and journalists to imbue ‘social conscience’ in their
writing (JN1 156). I will explore Jameson’s influence on Linke and to what extent, if
any, Linke engaged in Freire’s praxis of a dialog of love. Did she encounter all socioeconomic strata across her journeys or did she categorize people by class, possibly
narrowing her vision? Freire put it: ‘Human beings in communion liberate each other’
(p. 114). ‘Thus the road to revolution involves openness to the people, not mistrust’ (p.
119). In this sense, Freire, like Goethe recognizes participation as vital.
Linke mixed autobiography, documentary and journalism, to craft stories with
pedagogic value for a science of life. Her writing mode might resemble Wahl’s
understanding of Goethe’s method that uses ‘direct experience, empathy, intuition and
imagination’ (2005: 60). Linke’s interest in exploring social problems and doing social
work, then writing up her experiences, was participative. What did she document in
24
doing so? Linke’s narratives asked questions to the ‘self’—thus asking them to the
reader—a juxtaposition device she honed to make the reader think. Linke, like Sergei
Eisenstein’s ‘montage’ method, sought to jar the reader, as he jarred the audience, to
‘help itself’ rather than ‘entertain’ it (1963: 84). I want to explore if Linke sees and
writes with a multi-perspectival view. The premise is her writing is not one person’s
account but those of multiple voices found in her encounters.
Literary reviews portray Linke a ‘wayfarer’ or ‘wanderer’. I find these
descriptions somewhat vague, superficial and expected. If Linke was a travel writer,
although that term might be considered problematic, what did she write? Debbie Lisle
(2006) has criticised certain claims made about travel writing.
My point is that the cosmopolitan vision embedded in contemporary travel writing and espoused
by many liberal thinkers is not as emancipatory as it claims to be; rather, it is underscored by the
remnants of Orientalism, colonialism and Empire. [...] they actually produce new forms of power
that mimic the ‘previous sensibility’ of Empire (p. 5).
Lisle does not group all travel writers into one camp and suggests there are
‘emancipatory possibilities’ for the genre.
Many travel writers make deliberate efforts to distance themselves from the genre’s implication
in Empire by embracing the emancipatory possibilities created by an interconnected ‘global
village.’ Rather than ‘harking back to a previous sensibility’, these authors celebrate the
interdependence and common aims of all cultures. In this sense, they ‘lead from the front’ by
teaching us how to appreciate cultural difference and recognise the values common to all
humanity (p. 4).
Here, Arıf Dirlik’s notion of ‘difference in sameness’ (2002: 45) comes to mind. Linke
was critical of the self in whatever culture she journeyed. She worked hard, through
writing and interaction with encounters, to expose and negate stereotypes, prejudices
and habits of thought her readers might harbor toward other cultures. I have termed this
approach her ‘emancipatory praxis’.
If Linke’s narratives have pedagogic and possible scientific value, then what is
her positional relation to academia? Aslı Çırakmak (2005) researched texts written by
ordinary travellers, on the one hand, and statesmen and intellectuals, on the other, to
explore varied representations of Ottomans and Turks from the sixteenth to nineteenth
centuries by contrasting learning through ‘superficial reading’ with ‘industrious
experience’ (p. 42). She concludes, ‘there is a superior way to comprehend the lives of
others and different manners and that is by travelling. As against the kind of learning
through books, learning through experience seems to gain a new meaning and a
distinctive quality’ (p. 42). Çırakmak echoes Grossberg’s call for empirical study. But
Ayşe Trak (1985) points to limitations in social science, chiefly development literature:
25
It is extremely hard for the Western student of economic development, even the best-intentioned
one, with deep sensitivity and vast knowledge of different fields of social science, to make
political and ethical statements about a country with which he is not personally involved (p. 92).
Was Linke personally involved with Turkey? Moreover as a non-academic with no
authority of academic qualification, does this limit or discredit her work or strengthen
it? Derrida was critical of the alleged ‘professional’ for his or her tendency to objectify
science. He put it:
The writer can be ignorant or naïve in relation to the historical tradition which bears him or her,
or which s/he transforms, invents, displaces. But I wonder whether, in the absence of historical
awareness or knowledge s/he doesn’t “treat” history in the course of an experience which is
more significant, more alive, more necessary in a word, than, that of some professional
“historians” naively concerned to “objectify” the content of a science (Derrida 1992: 54-55).
Derrida viewed autobiography as liberating because it asks: ‘Who am I? Who is me?
What’s Happening’ (p. 35)? In corollary, Kazin thought ‘the autobiographical mode can
be an authentic way of establishing the truth of our experience’ (1964: 216). This thesis
considers if Linke’s experiences might become a kind of science as a pre-cultural
studies self-fashioned practitioner, prior to the discipline.
Considering this, did someone fund her or was she writing independently? Was
it her instinct for purposeful work? Was her aim to write ‘truths’ as a counter-narrative
to the dominant narrative of her time? Journeying into nations’ most rural enclaves, as a
woman, seems rather courageous. Was Linke a self-proclaimed feminist? My findings
indicate she did not declare herself one. I do, however, consider Linke’s life-way was
one of a forthright, independent and strong woman. Jameson, Linke’s close friend was
critical of first-wave feminism. Incidentally, Veblen thought women more courageous
than men. Although expected, I do not employ feminist theory nor does the thesis take a
strong feminist stance, other than Veblen’s argument women are less predatory than
men. Wenhold already framed Linke a Neue Frau. I wish to avoid Cartesian binaries.
Oddly, Linke was perceived a man. A journalist, commenting on one of her
Latin American narratives, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: ‘Mr. Linke writes
well about the jungle and its people’ (Holl p. 89 fn 111). Journalism suffers from
writers-reporters who are not adequately informed about where or whom they are
writing. Ece Temelkuran (2010) in an interview conducted in Armenia suggests to her
interviewee: ‘We’re both right to be wary of the journalists who visit our countries. […]
Only by listening to someone who cares deeply about a country can you learn the truth
about that country’ (p. 37). Did Linke care ‘deeply’ about Turkey? Did she see
journeying there a chance to establish herself as a writer or was she simply curious to
see how others had succeeded at building a nation where in Weimar they had failed?
26
Part II concentrates on Linke’s autobiography Allah Dethroned: A Journey
Through Modern Turkey (1937) and a journal article Social Changes in Turkey (1937),
written after a yearlong journey across the Republic in 1935. Another work Hitler’s
Route to Bagdad (1939) has been excluded because it is a reified academic text void of
intuition or understanding, containing only facts. ‘Turkey’ appears as one chapter
shaped by a Dr. A. E. Mende (1939: 11). Her authorship and knowledge of the Republic
appears to have been exploited by the Fabian Society.14 My analysis largely uses her
autobiographies that allow the human and other humans she encounters to come through
in the stories. This directs my secondary question; how did Linke’s praxis reflect in her
narratives on Turkey? I suggest there are strong parallels between her ‘experiential
learning’ and ‘spirit of insubordination’ within Turkey, in that they both worked for the
betterment of the whole under exceedingly trying circumstances. I evaluate her
narratives of experience and interaction with civil leaders, military officials, engineers,
doctors, teachers, directors and students—common man in totality—to assess if she was
a passive observer or active participant. If Linke did evolve from a self-regarding
individual to other-regarding person, to cultivate a new way of seeing as put forth in
Part I, did she direct a xenophobic, Eurocentric, scientific or Orientalist gaze toward the
Turks?15 Findings illustrate she did not see in these odd ways. She appears to have
approached Turkish fortunate encounters more in line with Goethe’s ‘tender
empiricism’ and Freire’s ‘dialog of love’. This might lead us to question if Linke’s
narratives are critical toward the industrialization under Mustafa Kemal and his peers.
Scholars writing on the Kemalist regime have pointed out foreign journalists and
filmmakers were used to produce positive propaganda about the Republic as the nation
forever felt under threat of negative publicity (Boyar and Fleet 2005). My premise is
that her texts are left open with carefully nuanced criticism and praise.
Not only in Weimar but also in the Turkish context and the countries to which
she would later journey, I see her in the position of the woodcutter in the painting of
Şeker Ahmet Paşa (1841-1907) The Woodcutter and the Forest. This late-Ottoman
painter studied in Paris, and perhaps the experiences afforded there helped cultivate a
14
Of the British Fabian Society, V. I. Lenin (1920) wrote it a ‘reformist organisation founded in 1884.
The membership consisted, in the main, of bourgeois intellectuals. The Fabians denied the necessity of
the proletariat’s class struggle and the socialist revolution, and contended that the transition from
capitalism to socialism was possible only through petty reforms and the gradual reorganisation of
society. In 1900 the Fabian Society joined the Labour Party’ (1920 fn 6). Margaret Storm Jameson
loathed the ‘bureaucratic elitism of Fabian socialism’ (Birkett 2006).
15
Use of ‘Turks’ refers to what has evolved to ‘Türkiyelı’ that accounts all citizens of Turkey. I do not
break down each ethnicity because it would render the thesis illegible. I treat Turkey and ‘Turks’ as I
treat Canada and ‘Canadians’ whose totality define a nation.
27
new way of seeing; a multi-perspectival one. In his painting Ahmet depicted a
woodcutter figure from both the perspective of the woodcutter working in the forest and
perspective of the forest over the woodcutter. The painting, because of a perspective
error between an omnipresent beech tree at the far right of the frame and a woodcutter
and his mule on the left, fascinates John Berger. The viewer sees a kind of ‘double
vision’. Berger put it:
Now this experience, which is that of anybody familiar with forests, depends upon your seeing
yourself in double vision. You make your way through the forest and, simultaneously, you see
yourself, as from the outside, swallowed by the forest. What gives this painting its peculiar
authority is its faithfulness to the experience of the figure to the woodcutter (1991: 88).
I suggest this ‘double vision’ might not be so different from how Linke sees. A
pauperized person telling stories of the self, (fear and hope) journeying in the forest
(different cultures) cultivates in Linke a ‘criticality’ mentioned earlier. In the sense of
Goethe, it is an ability to see and experience in a multi-perspectival manner reliant on
the method of ‘tender empiricism’. Turkey, a nation and culture unfamiliar to Linke, is a
chance to experience new ways of doing and being in another habituation. It allows her
to step outside of herself because there, she will meet habits and habituation different,
yet the same, to those experienced in Europe. She might experience Dirlik’s ‘difference
in sameness’. It might be ‘emancipation and enlargement of experience’ (Dewey
1910/2007: 156). How do the Turks look back at her and possibly teach and change
Linke? I put forth the idea Turkish encounters may have served as Linke’s teachers
contributing to her evolution and her work for common good in Latin America. If Linke is working for a science of life and if her narratives have pedagogic
value, it might be proper to recall Goethe’s advice to scientists.
All things in nature, especially the commoner forces and elements, work incessantly upon one
another; we can say that each phenomenon is connected with countless others just as we can say
that a point of light floating in space sends it rays in all directions. Thus when we have done an
experiment of this type, found this or that piece of empirical evidence, we can never be careful
enough in studying what lies next to it or derives directly from it. […] To follow every single
experiment through its variations is the real task of the scientific researcher. His duty is precisely
the opposite of what we expect from the author who writes to entertain (1995: 16).
Then the task for Linke might be to see the ‘variations’ in other cultures. Taking Big
Business as the ‘light’—perhaps darkness for many souls—sending its ‘rays’ across the
globe, Linke’s journey is a way to see and learn how Turkey and her people were in the
process of adapting to the abstract notion of living in a Republic. Dewey’s first
principle of ‘continuity’ posed ‘every experience lives on in further experiences’ (1938:
27). Linke’s German struggle for democracy is continuity in another form in Turkey’s
28
struggle to build a nation. ‘Interaction’ for Dewey ‘assigns equal rights to both factors
in experience—objective and internal conditions’ to form a ‘situaton’ (1938: 42).
Situation and interaction are inseparable. Linke’s learning in one situation is an equal
learning in another which in Freire’s reading of situation offers the following:
People, as being “in a situation,” find themselves rooted in temporal-spatial conditions which
mark them and which they also mark. They will tend to reflect on their own “situationality” to
the extent that they are challenged by it to act upon it (1970/1996: 90).
Just as Linke attempted to understand her experiences in Weimar, her ‘situation’ in the
Turkish case of their ‘situation’ is to ‘find out the way in which the elements of a
culture interact with each other and the way in which the elements of human nature are
caused to interact with one another under conditions set by their interaction with the
existing environment’ (Dewey 2008: 76). Here, habits and instincts come into play. In
other words, how does the ‘spirit of insubordination’ in the people of Turkey interact
with the new social conditions (habits) propagated by Mustafa Kemal and his peers to
cultivate a modern Republic? Linke posed questions for the reader. Was Atatürk
‘Beloved—or feared?’ (AD 19). Again, she was trying to make sense of what she saw
and experienced.
I felt confused. The modern station, the broad avenue, the post-war façade of the hotel, and these
ragged men and women with their primitive means of transport and certainly an equally
primitive life—were they merely two different stages in a natural development, or two worlds
following two parallel roads that would never meet, or were the up-to-date things I had seen,
strewn about at random by an inconsiderate government beyond the means of the country (AD
17)?
Were things just strewn about or did they have a purpose? What end did they work for?
Linke made some comments about Turkish social formation and structures in
her autobiography, either woven into the narrative or as endnotes to the chapter. I pick
up on some of these. In placing Linke in her German habituation with a ‘native bias’
peculiar to it, I find it equally important to place the Turks in their habituation and to
tease out a ‘conventional wisdom’ peculiar to them. To do so I explore Ottoman social
structures and institutions to better understand out of what past they evolved. The
Ottoman Empire lasted a long time, beginning in the twelfth century, a period long
enough for a culture to establish certain habits and habituation. Thus, certain social
patterns and formations cumulatively shaped this vast expanse of peoples and cultures.
There is much to learn on the subject. For instance, production in the Ottoman Empire
according to Halil İnalcık has been largely misunderstood as the Asiatic mode of
production (AMP) based on British colonial documents Marx read on India, to construct
29
an overall analysis on Asia. India and the Ottoman Empire were different entities and
İnalcık questions the validity of sourcing information tainted by British colonialism
(1993: 139-140).
Although Mustafa Kemal and his peers worked to make a clear break from the
empire to constitute a fresh start in the Republic by literally sweeping away the old, this
does not mean they entirely swept away ‘native bias’. By locating a certain ‘native bias’
it also becomes apparent what challenges they were up against or employed to their
favor. I briefly turn to Ottoman habituation to interpret the origins of certain habits and
habituation that may have carried over in the formation of the Republic. Resting
between Part I and Part II, a chapter entitled Empire to Republic explores these
peculiarities. The thesis considers the reasoning and worldview constituting the
Ottoman social formation and their adaptability and resistance, cumulated in the
Ottoman Empire, and to what extent habit and habituation continue or evolve in the
Republic. By the nineteenth century it becomes apparent adaptability and resistance was
caused by outside intervention aimed at reducing the empire to an inferior,
insubordinate position, leading to eventual collapse. World War I was the outcome.
Şerif Mardin argues micro study on modern Turkey is much needed as there is
too much focus on the macro of state and social structures that tend to brush over
individual experience (Mardin cited in Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997: 66). Moreover, Esra
Özyürek claims the 1920s and 1930s in Turkey are often remembered as a nostalgic
utopia, to which there is a ‘lack of real witnesses’ (2006: 17). Here, Linke’s narratives,
as a witness to Turkey’s modernization, may contribute to scholarship on the era.
Academic research in the last two decades on the late Ottoman and early Republican era
has criticized an alleged ‘elite’ for top-down rule that imposed their beliefs and
behaviors on the people (Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997, Keyder 1987, Mardin 1997).
Kasaba put it:
…the political elites saw themselves as the most important force for change in the Ottoman
Empire and Turkey. To them, Ottoman-Turkish society was a project, and the people who lived
in Turkey could at most be the objects of experiments. They freely used categories such as “old”
and “new” or “traditional” and “Western” in order to reduce the dimensions of their task to
manageable proportions and present themselves as the sole bearers of progress. They regarded
reform strictly as a top-down process (Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997: 23-24).
Marxist analysis of the early Republican era divides the populace into ‘elite’
bureaucrats whose power rests on two groups—commercial bourgeoisie-landowner
class and the military-civilian bureaucracy—ruling over a laboring and rural populace,
largely comprised of peasantry (Öncü 2003). Rule under a single-party RPP (People’s
30
Republican Party) known as the early Republican era drew individuals from the
bureaucracy, military and substantial landholders to form what has been termed ‘elites’
(Olson and İnce 1977; Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997; Mardin 1997) and in the Marxist
tradition the ‘bourgeoisie’ (Ahmad 1977; Keyder 1987; Savran 1992; Boratav 1992).
Additionally, some academics refer to the Strong State Tradition, a particularist view
that does not place a main focus on conceptualizing the economy or capitalism but this
does not mean they ignore entirely these conceptualizations in their research (Mardin
1973; Heper 1985; Göle 1997). This diversity of vantage points, what might be referred
to as a multi-perspectival approach, may baffle foreign academics that seek a clear
dichotomy of either/or. The thesis draws knowledge from these diverse views.
Through Linke’s eyes and experiences, I take a closer look, as Mardin and
Özyürek suggest, as to how these ‘elites’ or ‘bourgeoisie’ or possibly ‘common man’
worked on the ground together, how they interacted and possibly cooperated to cultivate
a flourishing Republic. Linke makes it clear the exceedingly trying circumstances they
faced. First, they were impoverished from a series of wars fought over the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Second, trade restrictions, lack of industry and the
Depression seriously challenged and impeded early industrialization. The ‘elites’ could
not eradiate poverty or change old habits overnight. Here, her way of seeing might
provide a multi-perspectival view on the role of women, the ‘elites’ as well as the
‘peasantry’ because she encountered them all.
Linke does not arrive at an inopportune time. In fact she journeys across the
nation at the height of Étatism, the rolling out of Turkey’s proposed ‘third way’ (üçünü
yol) (Okyar 1965; Birtek 1985; Tuna 2009). The Turkish ‘experiment’ of Étatism
presents a problem for Marxist class-analysis due to the nature of the ‘mixed economy’
that allowed for diverse modes of production such as private enterprise, state-run and
state-owned industry and agricultural production. There was not a central committee
like in the USSR rather it relied on the responsibility of bureaucrats, local mayors and
state banks to build-up state industries. Étatism is not socialism outright nor is it
capitalism either. In fact, there is much contention about Étatism, apparent in the
chapter Empire to Republic. Linke would traverse this dynamic setting to experience
this experiment. Osman Okyar (1965) and Faruk Birtek (1985) both analyze this period,
but for the most part, Turkish-style Étatism has been by-passed by academic research.
In 1932, Mustafa Kemal defined the project as follows:
The principle of Étatism that we have chosen to follow is not in any way the same as in
Collectivism or in Communism which aims at removing all instruments of production and
31
distribution from individuals, thus organizing society on a completely different basis and leaving
no room for private and individual enterprise and action in the economic field. The end of Étatist
policy, while it recognises private initiative and action as the main basis of the economy, is to
bring the Nation in the shortest time possible to an adequate level of prosperity and material
welfare, and in order to achieve this, to ask the State to concern itself with those affairs where
this is required by the high interests of the Nation, especially in the economic field (Atatürk cited
in Okyar 1965: 101).
While his statement might appear a declared plan carved in stone, it might also be
flexible. Okyar points out ‘pragmatic and practical considerations far outweighed any
doctrinaire motive in the adoption of Étatist policy. Necessity, and not a doctrinaire
vision of the future, was the mother of Étatism’ (p. 101). I put forth this might constitute
a kind of knitting the nation together through common workmanship. Here, there is an
opportunity for Linke to contribute knowledge on a rather ignored subject. For this
reason Turkey provides a good case study. It allows a view of Linke as a sensitive
participant, absorbing others voices and striving to find signs of common betterment, in
the context of a newly modernising and developing country where there was an avowed
interest in working for betterment of the whole.
Determined to encounter all socio-economic strata she even met people in their
homes. In this sense, she practiced the philosophy of ‘going to the people’ that
sociologist Ziya Gökalp called for (1959: 259), an earlier term borrowed from the
Russian narodniki by Yusuf Akçura. Terms like ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ in the early
Republican era drew primarily, but not exclusively, from Gökalp. Influenced by
positivism and Émile Durkheim he reworked an original treatise that outlined Turkish
culture (rural) and civilization (urban) as inherently compatible with Western
civilization. By fully embracing western science and methods Gökalp argued that
Turkey was equal to Europe. To facilitate the ‘cultural revolution’ there must be a
‘going to the people’ of reciprocal exchange whereby urbanites would bring Anatolia
civilization, and Anatolia would bring urbanites ‘culture’. Education became the
catalyst for social (r)evolution.16 Everything done was to teach a new cultural pattern. In
a fledgling nation with over eighty percent of its national economy based in agriculture
how would they industrialize and from where would they find skilled workers? What
role would women play in the effort to flourish as an independent sovereign nation?
Linke was witness to this ongoing process in 1935.
The title of Part I of the thesis: Who is Lilo Linke? constitutes three chapters that
follow her evolution from a self-regarding individual to other-regarding person.
16
Across the thesis I use revolution and evolution interchangeably as (r)evolution. The revolution was
realized in a war against the imperialist invasion of Anatolia. The reforms of Mustafa Kemal were also
distinctly revolutionary in virtually all areas of everyday life. As the thesis touches on the former
empire, I construct my frame to also encompass social evolution of the people within Turkey.
32
Chapter two places Linke in the German context of social, political and
economic turmoil during WWI and the Weimar Republic using Veblen’s notion of
habituation. I explore her early emotions and employ Bloch’s notion on hunger as an
emotion, such that, hope rather than fear, guided Linke to imagine becoming a better
person in a better world.
Chapter three juxtaposes learning in educational institutions, what is
‘stultification’ for Jacques Rancière, to that of learning outside the institution through
daily experiences and ‘fortunate encounter[s]’. I consider how Linke’s encounters
constitute a new way of seeing and learning that resemble Goethe’s scientific method of
‘tender empiricism’ Zarte Empirie. Fortunate encounters helped her overcome a strong
sense of learned inferiority.
Chapter four extends this way of learning to Freire’s word=work=praxis as
Linke’s writing has emancipatory goals. Further thought is given to Linke’s refusal to
bend to institutional demands, and whose spirit might resemble what Veblen called a
‘masterless man’.17 She seemed to possess a ‘spirit of insubordination’ in the sense
Veblen offered, owing to an instinct for purposeful work, care of others, and curiosity.
Empire to Republic, a chapter resting between Part I and Part II, briefly outlines
the (r)evolution out of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic to touch on
‘native-bias’ peculiar to the Ottomans and later to the Turks, to assess if Linke’s way of
seeing and conclusions drawn were realistic or exaggerated. Étatism is discussed
underlining the aims of Mustafa Kemal, his peers and common man on this journey.
Part II opens out the ideas of Veblen’s ‘spirit of insubordination’ as they appear
in Linke to mirror how these same instincts emerge in those within Turkey to work for
the betterment of the whole.
Chapter five sets Linke in Turkey by way of ‘idle curiosity’ in the sense of
Veblen, and reviews the ideas of Gökalp, Ülken and Baltacıoğlu comparing them to
those of John Dewey on pedagogy. Taken together they form a blueprint for national
education. Not unlike Linke’s ‘experiential learning’, common man was in the process
of learning by doing, as witnessed on her journey across Anatolia.
Chapter six explores the ‘instinct of workmanship’ in common man to suggest
Linke was little different from Turkish women and men working toward a better future
for the whole. Following Linke’s journey, I reveal how women worked alongside men
and how both viewed the process of social change. Her position as a woman traveling
17
Veblen’s use of the term is not gender specific.
33
across Anatolia, draws attention to word=work=praxis as a ‘tender empiricist’ as she
has a keen sense of the Depression impeding their progress.
Chapter seven opens out Veblen’s notion of ‘parental bent’ and the relationship
between the peasantry and civil leaders, directors and engineers in their efforts to
industrialize. By way of Linke’s experiences, I explore from whom they borrowed ideas
and how they implemented them in state-run industry and cooperatives. I consider their
practice similar to Veblen’s ‘Soviet of Technicians’ and contrast it to ‘pecuniary gain’.
Chapter eight, in lieu of a conclusion, presents findings on Linke from her work
in Ecuador using them as a measure to reflect, intuit and confirm what her aims were in
writing on Turkey. Reviewing Linke’s life in totality, I summarize what she taught and
what I learned: autobiography as emancipatory pedagogy, thus closing the circle.
34
Part I: Who is Lilo Linke?
35
—Chapter 2—
Embracing Life
From Hunger to Hope
Forward, forward, we have far to go to find the blue flower
near the ridge of the mountains. If you get tired, I shall
encourage and support you, but forward, follow me!
—Lilo Linke (RD 178)
Linke’s stories document what I conceive as her journey to becoming a better person.
Exploring her emotions and actions to understand better what she and German society
were experiencing and would continue to experience, I assert that her narratives are
pedagogies of hope amidst social, political and economic turmoil—WWI and the
interwar period—in a time of darkness. This chapter examines Linke’s stories while
drawing from Ernst Bloch’s ideas on ‘concrete utopias’ (1996: xxvii) and Veblen’s
notion of habituation (1914/1964: 38-39). Veblen reasoned behavior coerced by
‘imbecile institutions’ that used self-aggrandizement and fear (1914/1964: 43) as
technological advances transformed people from peaceable instincts into war-like habits
(1899/2009: 11, 19). Linke’s experiences and her writing up of them constitute praxis to
transform experiences of despair into stories of hope as ‘anticipatory illumination’
(1996: 73). Bloch called this Vor-Schein18 and meant thereby a projection toward utopia
by developing an ability to imagine becoming a better person in a better world (p. 156).
Bloch posited hope, for some, arose from the emotion of hunger yet Linke’s early
emotions were seldom hopeful. Surpassing imbecile institutions, after experiencing and
recognizing their coercion and imagining herself beyond them, I examine how Linke
evolved from a ‘self-regarding’ individual to ‘other-regarding’ person to work for
betterment of common man (Dugger and Sherman 2000: 149; Öncü 2009).
Restless Days, written at the age of twenty-eight was Linke’s second
autobiography and an account of her growing up in the east of Berlin amongst the
working class in tenement houses in a dreary industrial zone. Constructing her story
from the point of view of a young person genuinely trying to make sense of such
18
Vor-schein is translated ‘pre-appearances’ but Zipes uses ‘anticipatory illumination’ (Bloch 1996: xx).
36
tumultuous times in a society fragmented by war and class warfare, her narrative relied
on childhood memories but also included accurate and detailed experiences in her later
association with politicians when Linke became involved with the DDP (Deutsche
Demokratische Partei) political circle. Holl lauds Linke for her authentic and ‘vivid
description of political events such as election campaigns and mass rallies’ and as a
direct witness her ‘unerring depictions of political personalities who had crossed her
path’ (1987: 73). I intuit her account to be truthful, based on research findings and her
lived experiences, to write stories as she stated, that would be ‘as near the truth’ as
possible.19 I assert these are counter-narratives to the dominant narrative of war,
inflation, consumerism, racism and fascism. Linke was documenting what was
happening to her and her society and the rapid change it was undergoing. Not only did
she tell of petty everyday normative family disputes but also the deep-seated social
problems that festered in Linke and German society as a whole. With little higher
education her text is not reified with theoretical terminology or party propaganda, thus
leaving it open to interpretation. For example, Linke wrote that rather than turning
communist, she knew the ‘truth lay somewhere in that direction’ (RD 363). She did not
choose a particular Left but leaves her narratives open. I read her narrative as a precultural studies work that has much to teach from below about the everyday situation in
which those in the east of Berlin lived and how German habituation gradually evolved
from being industrious and peaceable to predatory and war-like, in the Veblenian sense.
I begin with an overview of the Linke family and habituation in which they
lived. Lilo Linke was born 31 October 1906 into what she defined a ‘petit bourgeois’
family in the working class district in the east of Berlin. Her father Paul Johannes
Friedrich Otto Linke (Fig. 3) born in Tannenwalde, Prussia (1878-1933)20 was a civil
servant employed as a topographer-surveyor for the Prussian government drawing maps
on the eastern front. In WWI he was stationed in Graudenz (RD 10) eastern Prussia
(now Poland) but not on the front line. Despite conservative views he was on the side of
peace (RD 83). Juliane Henriette Lucie Linke (Mickley) (Fig. 4) was born in Berlin
(1875-?)21 and worked as a railway assistant. The couple married on 5 February 1906.22
Lucie left her post to become a housewife. Paul and Lucie represent a generation
habituated to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf.
19
20
21
22
Chatham House Library (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) Registry File 10313/2, Letter
from Lilo Linke to Research Secretary Miss Margaret Cleeve, 3 May 1952.
Nichtamtliche Eintragungen. With permission, Marc Linke, 2013.
Ibid.
Ibid.
37
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf constructed the façade of a ‘culture war’ against
Catholics by Protestants after annexing Alsace and Lorraine (1871) from France.
Disguised as a religious clash, in actuality, it was the push for industrialization over
agriculture that pitted landowners against industrialists, fomenting an economic clash.
In an expansionist race—period of unfettered liberalism from 1870 to 1914—Germans
competed with rival British, French and Dutch colonialism for territory and economic
supremacy. The German Colonial Society (Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft) became the
apex of the expansionist movement (Short 2012: 24). Social democracy was suppressed.
Taxation and tariffs forced German common man to foot the bill for expansionism.
Bismarck’s authoritarian rule employed agent provocateurs to pass an Exclusion Bill
against the Socialists. Three pillars of bourgeois society—state, law, economy—were
complicit in Kulturkampf using the media, amongst other tactics, to propagate a
religious clash. To further coerce Germans into war-like habit, two events were staged
in 1878. On 11 May, Max Hödel a tin worker shot at the Emperor and was later
executed. It was later proven he had no contact with social democracy. On 2 June, Dr.
Karl Nobiling shot the Emperor, seriously wounding him. He committed suicide and
left a note stating he didn’t know why he did the act (Oliveira 1942: 52-53). These
incidents fomented animosity against socialists and the bill was passed. Only in 1890
did social democracy throw off Bismarck’s authoritarian rule (1878-1890). The SPD
(Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) constituted a ‘rival public’ that articulated a
‘counterdiscourse’ to conservative German expansion (Short p. 18). But in 1914 the
SPD supported the vested interests and entered WWI on 1 August. Rosa Luxemburg
and six SPD members opposed to the war founded the Gruppe Internationale on 5
August 1914 (Kuhn 2012: xxiv). Habituated to Kulturkampf Lucie was likely coerced,
as others of conservative sentiment, to extremist views against the socialists, French,
Russians and Jews. Scheck (2004) points out conservatives and the right actively
campaigned against socialists and social democrats in Weimar. Lucie’s taken for
granted habits of thought expressed in the home inevitably influenced her children. Was
only Kulturkampf to blame?
In Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (1915/1964) Veblen
questioned why Germans had a proclivity for militarism. Cumulative causation brought
about this ‘native bias’ (habituation). First, the Germans were the last group to embrace
Christianity after paganism. In so doing, they had not experienced the coercive ‘makebelieve’ of statecraft as Christian dynasties in southern Europe. Embracing Christianity
with serious rigor, Germans became habituated to an admirable life perceived as a
38
‘master-class’ (p. 96). This took centuries to learn and would take time to unlearn.
Second, as Germans were late to establish a nation-state they held a native bias toward
‘princely enterprise, resting on an increasingly useful and increasingly loyal populace’
(p. 96) that cumulated in the contamination of the ‘modern scheme of institutions and
modern conceptions of life’ (p. 97). A ‘sense of national solidarity and of feudal loyalty
and service have coalesced’ Veblen proposed, ‘to bring this people to that climax of
patriotic devotion’ (p. 98-99). Third, Germans took the lead in industrialization having
borrowed ideas that took the British centuries to develop.23 In Veblen’s mind, the
British paid the ‘penalty for having been thrown into the lead’ (p. 132). By the twentieth
century England’s technology was outdated and their workforce exhausted. Germans,
on the other hand, had a young well-educated workforce, adept in technological
knowhow. In the so-called modern phase of civilization with improvements in transport,
communication and warfare technology, an increase in national defense and competitive
armament caused jealousy and hostility between nations (p. 21). Germans took the lead
in the Industrial Arts ‘forcing the pace’ in a ‘race for preparedness’ for war (p. 20).
Veblen was not laying blame with Germans in particular. In An Inquiry Into the Nature
of Peace (1917/1964) he clarified: ‘All people of Christendom are possessed of a
sufficiently alert sense of nationality, and by tradition and current usage all the national
governments of Christendom are warlike establishments’ (p. 6) whose sacred formula is
‘[t]he Kingdom, the Power and the Glory’ (p. 64). Christian nations’ ‘warlike ideal of
worth’ and ‘patriotic ambition’ has a distinctly ‘concrete form of personal loyalty to a
master’ and ‘coalesces with a servile habit of mind’ (p. 55).
Jealousy and ambition reached a climax between 1870 and 1914. Hostility was
propagated between nations by those Veblen called ‘phrase-makers’, whose task was to
stimulate national, predatory war-like habit of mind in common man, since the latter
would give their lives in the war adventure of ‘patriotic manslaughter’ (p. 41). For
instance, the French propagandist Maurice Barrés (1862-1923)—journalist, politician
and novelist—was a revivalist of ‘nationalisme’ over patriotism, creating a cult of ‘le
peuple’. ‘Never had le peuple been made to sound so like the German Volk’ (Ousby
2002: 186). Veblen believed statesmen exploit the human instinct of ‘joint prestige’—
former prestige of work for the community (1917/1964: 51). Prestige evolved into
‘national honour’ (p. 59) against competitors. Sentimental phrases like, ‘national honour
is beyond price’ (p. 27) or ‘affairs of honour’ and the like became ‘spiritual capital’.
23
The English took ideas from Continental Europe during the Thirty Years War, thus skilled workman
that fled to the island helped advance the English Industrial Arts.
39
Flag usage and ‘recital of an appropriate formula of words’ move ‘in the realm of
magic’ (p. 29). Prestige cumulated to preserve the community’s ‘material interests’ and
the vindication of ‘national honour’ was now perceived as advancement of a nation’s
culture (p. 23). For Veblen, this type of coerced patriotism breaks the peace. Of the
Peace Conference, MacMillan points out in her work Paris 1919 (2001), the Allies
presented Weimar a reparations bill of 132 billion gold marks. Concerned they might
expand manufacturing and dump cheap goods on world markets, the hefty bill, in Lloyd
George’s envious words, ‘would mean that for two generations, we would make
German workmen our slaves’ (p. 187).
This jealousy and hostility between nations and their statesmen appears
narcissistic. Rather than pathological conceptions of narcissism, Erich Fromm
(1973/1990) equated it a component of authoritarian domination taking active or passive
forms. An authoritarian attitude is thereby a masochistic desire to submit to authority
and a sadistic urge to control others. The ‘narcissistic person achieves a sense of
security in his own entirely subjective conviction of his perfection, his superiority over
others […] He needs to hold on to his narcissistic self-image, since his sense of worth as
well as his sense of identity are based on it’ (p. 272). Building on Fromm, Cheliotis
asserts humans are prone to narcissism because of ‘the desire to uphold or improve
one’s social standing according to the requirements of given cultural milieus and the
overarching “metastructures” of politics and the economy’ (2011: 338). Common man
and elites alike may be narcissists. In the context of group narcissism, it constitutes a
‘lack of real satisfaction in life’ (Fromm p. 275). Humans can become cruel and
treacherous. Fromm gave an example of group narcissism. ‘The violation of one of the
symbols of group narcissism—such as the flag, or the person of the emperor, the
president, or an ambassador—is reacted to with such intense fury and aggression by the
people that they are even willing to support their leaders in a policy of war’ (Fromm p.
276). Pairing Veblen’s thoughts on honour with Fromm’s ideas on narcissism, they
appear to speak naturally to one another, both on a sociological and individual level.
Within this envy and hostility between cultures and nations, which cumulated in
authoritarian regimes that incited group narcissism, Linke would have to find her way.
Just eight years old when WWI broke out, Lilo’s world appeared nothing other
than normal. She had little idea, then, what ramifications the war would have on her
future. Unaware of the real reasons that led to WWI her mother blamed the constructed
enemy. Paul was absent from the home for long periods leaving Lucie, Lilo, younger
40
brother Heinz24 (Fig. 2) and their grandmother Lilo viewed a stoic Prussian, to manage
the household. In the role of a bossy sister, Lilo bullied and terrorized Heinz, learning
this habit from organized battles in the back streets (RD 56). Only nine years old, Heinz
was caught with a gang of boys stealing watches (RD 58). These older boys frequently
engaged in street fights. ‘Sometimes many hundred boys from eight to sixteen years of
age were involved. It was a matter of honour for every “male” inhabitant of WeserStrasse to defend it against the shameless and detestable cowards of Kronprinzen-Allee.
[…] There was no idea of fair play; “Victory or death” was the battle-cry’, wrote Linke
(RD 56-57). Children’s street games mirrored the games of war between nations.
Linke’s use of words like ‘honour’, ‘cowards’, and ‘battle-cry’ reflect the phrases of
statesmen. In corollary, the ‘battle-cry’ of striking workers (class warfare) at armament
factories in her neighborhood was a reality in the children’s everyday lives. Economic
success was the social fact of European society. To maintain a ‘standard of living’
brings respectability in the ‘ability to pay’ (Veblen 1919/2007: 394). When common
man lost his standard of living, his self-esteem and dignity was also lost. Unable to
maintain a decent ‘standard of living’ it only fueled further jealousy and hatred toward
neighbors and nations alike.
Her parents forever quarreled over money. Lilo’s relation with her father was
affable. He ‘clearly preferred me’ (RD 18). But in another instance she recalled him
caning her. Paul, the son of a Prussian soldier, seemed to treat his children with a strong
hand. He reprimanded: ‘Don’t stoop so! Sit up! Don’t walk on your big toe! Stand
straight’ (RD 17)! Lilo confided: ‘We rarely found the way to each other’ (RD 18). Paul
likely inherited his father’s learned habit of military discipline and might have repeated
this habit in training his children. Relations with her mother were also strained. Lucie’s
incapacity to give or receive love reflected on the children. Her only pleasure was the
piano, despite a lack of talent, according to Lilo. She resented Lucie’s habit of hero
worship. ‘[The piano] was an altar erected to the heroes of the war, and my mother held
a silent worship in front of it’ (RD 27). When a neighbor lost her son, Lucie consoled
her: ‘You can be proud, Frieda—you have sacrificed him for the Fatherland’ (RD 28).
Acknowledging herself as obstinate Lilo wrote: ‘My parents, especially my mother,
soon learnt that it was better for all of us when they just left me alone’ (RD 17). From
these passages it appears Lilo was critical of and distant from her family, particularly of
her mother’s extremist views.
The German patriotic devotion described in Linke’s narrative might seem like
24
Lilo encrypted his name as Fritz. His birth name was Gustav August Heinz Linke (1908-1969).
41
petty incidents yet they suggest that common man was coerced into a war-like habit of
mind in everyday life. Her narrative naturally speaks to Veblen’s theories25 written
around the same time Linke actually experienced them. On a school trip Linke visited a
forty-two foot wooden statue of Hindenburg (Iron Hindenburg) erected in Königsplatz
in Berlin on 4 September 1915. The monument was a means to raise money for the war.
Writing of the event in 1934 Linke was, by then, critical of German habituation.
[N]ails were sold, golden, silver, copper, iron ones, and every purchaser could hammer them
himself into the monument. All the schools went in large troops to fulfill their patriotic duty. I
bought ten iron ones instead of one of silver, and with a strong effort I nailed each of them
deeply into the wood, hoping that by some mysterious transference Hindenburg himself might
feel the pain (RD 12).
But as a young girl of nine, hammering nails into Hindenburg’s massive wooden feet
must have had a profound effect on her and fellow Germans—a display of noble
devotion and patriotic duty. Those critical of the statue, like Adolf von Hildebrand a
renowned German sculptor, commented in a letter to a friend ‘the hammering of nails
into a portrait statue makes a hellishly barbaric impression—this manner of expressing
admiration for a hero remains baffling’ (cited in Simmons 2001: 211). German
newspapers reported only five hours after the opening of the monument over 20,000
nails had been hammered into the feet. Citizens signed their name in the ‘Book of Iron’
to confirm their support for the war (p. 211). War symbols permeated life to such an
extent even soldier statuettes were made out of chocolate. Linke recalled eating her
brother’s most prized possession leaving just the legs. ‘He thought him much too
valuable to destroy and kept him on the highest board of his book-shelf’ (RD 20). Heinz
was horrified. Linke threatened: ‘I shall kill him, I shall kill him; if you find his bloody
corpse one day, you need not look for the murderer’ (RD 21).
On the eve of WWI, reading was the most popular leisure activity (Donson
2004: 580). For the first time, youth literature was used to mobilize masses of youth to
join the war (p. 581). While Karl Kautsky and Clara Zetkin rallied against militarism
and jingoism in youth literature in 1906 (p. 582), with the anticipation of WWI
publishers profited handsomely off war literature. Borrowing from the theologians, war
was depicted as a ‘Holy War’. Owing to this, slaughter on the front line was distorted.
Youth literature during the war accordingly transmitted to a wider audience than before the
myths of heroism, patriotism, sacrifice, afterlife, adventure, and manhood. Like teachers and
leaders of youth clubs, most authors of youth literature wanted to mobilize youth in support of
the war and reproduced the same patriotic portraits, shibboleths, and concepts of “the Spirit of
25
From 1870 onward, Veblen experienced first hand the corporate take-over of the United States by
railroad, steel and gold conglomerates.
42
1914” that dominated adult literature (p. 580).
War, as Veblen acknowledged, was a masculine domain—men tend to be predatory—a
psychological trait carried over from an earlier predatory stage that played out in the
present as an ‘able-bodied men’s office to fight and hunt’ (1899/2009: 15). From youth
literature, boys learned that to enter ‘manhood’ meant going to war (Donson p. 581).
Stories taught and promised ‘adventure’ at war, inciting young men by the tens of
thousands to volunteer. Theodore Roosevelt proposed ‘manhood was tied to youthful
vigor’ calling it ‘strenuous masculinity’, a dominant concept not only in North America
but also across Europe (p. 580). ‘Picture books anthropomorphized England as a
nefarious schoolboy in need of a good whipping; novels had male and female characters
whose favorite activity was to show “good German hate” toward England’ (p. 584). In
short, life was completely habituated to war. Every point of interaction with common
man was a chance to teach and coax predatory habit, cumulated from Kulturkampf and
earlier statecraft. It would be remarkably naïve to suggest Lilo, her family and
neighborhood lived in isolation from war when all facets of life were permeated by it.
Her autobiography is laden with experiences that remark on this predatory mindset,
increasingly manifest in aggressive behavior of adults and children alike.
Linke’s poignant narrative attempted to make sense of what she experienced.
She posed a question to her readers and to herself. ‘Why was it that I hurt Fritz [Heinz]
and my mother so willfully?’ and recalled a gruesome incident. ‘At the age of four I had
killed a frog by stamping on it a hundred times, softly at first and then more and more
firmly till it was nothing but a yellow-green mud’ (RD 21). Startling behavior for a
young child, Lilo attempted to rationalize and make sense of her emotions and actions.
It was cruelty and jealousy that made me act like this. It was the dark satisfaction of making
somebody else suffer, but it was also the proud wish for power, the wish to command another
person’s feelings and doings, to cause them, to control them. And it was finally the longing for
excitement, the will to go to the extremest limit of sensation. I wanted to burn and to be burnt.
My imagination revelled even in the depth of unhappiness (RD 24).
Evident in Linke’s excerpt is the articulation, for the reader, of her feelings of ‘jealousy’
after learning the ‘proud wish for power’ and ‘longing for excitement’ mirroring battles
against the enemy, essentially narcissist in character. The habit of terrorizing her
brother, learned from playing street battles (like battles between nations), smacks of
sportsmanship. Veblen associated sports with war because, as in sports, one must outdo
an opponent. In England, sport is an addiction ‘diverting interest from the make-believe
of sports to that of war’, but in the German Fatherland ‘sporting blood’ is the ‘idle
classes into the service’ and further ‘growth of an aggressive war spirit’ (Veblen
43
1915/1964: 247). In corollary, Lucie’s sentiment was commensurate with Veblen’s idea
on German ‘native bias’. ‘You can be proud, Frieda—you have sacrificed him for the
Fatherland’ is testament to ‘personal loyalty to a master’. Veblen proposed that when
sufficiently coerced, humans revert to barbarism, no matter how civilized they perceive
themselves. Coerced habit of mind taught them to accept it ‘honourable’ and ‘worthy’
to assert a ‘strong hand’. ‘Under this common-sense barbarian appreciation of worth or
honour, the taking of life—the killing of formidable competitors, whether brute or
human—is honourable in the highest degree’ (Veblen 1899/2009: 17).
Living in this darkness, how did Linke see through her mother’s behavior and
extremist sentiment and that of her society at large, to begin to question and become
critical of it all? For Veblen, this moment is a question of ‘human behavior under
pressure of changing circumstances with a minimum of change in the formal rules
which govern this behavior’ (1923/1964: 225). Under the pressure of continued
pecuniary gain of the Vested Interests—the formal rules of ‘business-as-usual’—life
becomes so unbearable for common man that they eventually rebel. Wealth
accumulation through bloodshed eventually triggers those with idle curiosity, to
question the business—rising prices and lowering living standards. For example, the
Allied Powers implemented a blockade literally starving the German population into
defeat that didn’t let up even after the war (Vincent 1985: 50). Common man was direct
recipient of this barbarism. I turn to Linke’s experiences of hunger during the war and
Inflation, which paradoxically, helped her imagine and project the emotion of hope
toward a better life out of the darkness.
Devoting a chapter to the subject: ‘What Shall We Eat? Wherewithal Shall We
Be Clothed?’ (RD 31) Linke wrote: ‘Food queues have for ever burnt themselves into
my memory’ (RD 41). They drank Ersatz-Kaffee or ‘dishwater’ as they called it and ate
potatoes of a ‘greenish pulp’ with brown Ersatz-Sauce—gravy of ground down pebbles.
‘We consoled ourselves, saying: “It cleans the stomach, anyhow.” The same raw
material was used for the manufacture of soap, which was advertised with the slogan:
“Avoids the superfluous lather!” Sand was also the essential ingredient of a certain soup
and of a “sand”-wich paste’ (RD 33). Lilo and Heinz devoured the family’s meager
weekly food ration.26 Discovering an empty panty, Linke wrote of her mother:
She was tired of fighting in the void, too tired for anything. Life was not worth the trouble. To
lie down and die—what a temptation! But she could not leave us children, she had to carry on. I
26
This hunger would continue after the war. At the peak of the Inflation over ninety percent of an average
family budget was spent on food (Sneeringer 2004: 489).
44
was older than my age, I knew what she felt. My own heart was hopeless, too, and full of useless
remorse. Oh, in the future I would try all I could to help my mother (RD 35).
‘Hopeless’, but still wanting to ‘help’ her mother, Linke devised a clever tactic of
faking fainting spells to get priority in food lines. ‘Undernourished and thinly dressed,
too tall for my ten years, I stood among them to get a piece of meat or a pound of bones.
My numb hand was scarcely able to hold the money and the ration card’ (RD 33). Linke
wrote of the experience ‘slowly a fear began to rise in me, right from my feet through
my whole body, a fear of nothing special, just a general feeling of anxiety which
seemed to empty me and hindered me from breathing’ (RD 37). On occasion she
received a beating from women who discovered her fake fainting spells. ‘On the whole I
suffered the hunger without complaint, or at least with no more than the normal
complaint of a growing child that never gets enough food to eat’ (RD 39). When the
international Quaker Society arrived at her school after the war, of the physical
examination by the doctor, Linke recalled:
My spine stuck out like that of an old hack, my shoulders hung forward, my chest was sunk in.
The doctor only cast a glance at me and said to the nurse: “Of course, number one. How old did
you say? Thirteen.” This group comprised the undernourished; both my brother and I belonged
to it. My mother received the news as if it sullied her honour (RD 86).
Her mother’s sullied ‘honour’ is another indication of a ‘loyal populace’, such that even
though her children were diagnosed as undernourished, Lucie preferred to deny the fact.
Veblen’s assertion that common man keeps up appearances by feigning a ‘standard of
living’, fearing others will judge them unworthy, is applicable here. Lilo too, was
forever fearful of her appearance. ‘No little part of my restraint, my nervousness and
shyness was caused by my shabby and ridiculous appearance’ (RD 40). Although she
lived in poverty as many others in her community, she learned it was necessary to put
on a front of respectability through dress. ‘Dress’ for Veblen, is not clothing for
protecting the body but for ‘protecting the wearer’s respectability’ (1919/2007: 395).
Dress is a pecuniary habit. Linke remained forever concerned about her appearance and
dress for the rest of her life. Near starvation, her body might have resembled the thin
and distraught deformed figures in Egon Schiele (1890-1918) paintings. What might the
experience of hunger have meant for Linke? Might hunger have been influential to her
metamorphosis or evolution from despair to hope? How might the emotion of hope
project a new way of seeing to embrace life?
‘All too little has been said’, wrote Bloch, ‘about hunger’ (1986: 65). Since we
need it for self-preservation, hunger is our basic drive. Critical of psychoanalysis, Bloch
criticized Freud and Jung; Freud for deleting hunger to a ‘sub-species of the libido’ (p.
45
67) and Jung for hiding it in ‘archetypes’ (p. 62). He thought drives were ‘subject to
historical change and new ones arise with newly set goals’ (p. 67). In Bloch’s mind,
Freud’s basic drives were only good in their own time because of the ‘changing ways in
which needs are satisfied’ (p. 69). He argued hunger ‘is never discussed as a variable of
socio-economic conditions’ (p. 64). Hunger is of fundamental ‘economic interest’ (p.
67). Bloch claimed hunger both an emotional and physical state. The fundamental drive
of self-preservation is a ‘felt’ drive originating from hunger through ‘craving and
loathing’ manifest in ‘mental feelings and emotions’ (p. 70). Citing Goethe’s Faust:
‘Blood is a very special juice’, Bloch connected the emotion of hunger to its ‘organic
disposition’, ‘…a quite special juice flows through all mental feelings, it comes from
the heart, a blood which is also psychological’ (p. 70). Bloch grouped emotions like
fear, envy, anger, contempt and hate as those of rejection while emotions like
contentment, generosity, trust, admiration and love as those of inclination (p. 73).
Emotions possess a temporal aspect as ‘expectant emotions’ project toward a real future
while ‘filled emotions’ respond to the immediate unreal where nothing new happens (p.
74). Bloch considered hope the most authentic emotion. It was superior to fear.
However, not everyone was hopeful. Only those who embraced hope could imagine a
better future. ‘Hope, this expectant counter-emotion against anxiety and fear, is
therefore the most human of all mental feelings and only accessible to men, and it also
refers to the furthest and brightest horizon’ (Emphasis added, p. 75).
I suggest Linke’s narrative espouses Bloch’s idea of how the physical drive of
hunger becomes an emotion. ‘Slowly, a fear began to rise … through my whole body’ is
an emotion of rejection in her being cast away from the other needy in the line: rejection
even by the rejected. It is all hunger-based that is, economically based, a result of
economic strangulation during wartime and the Inflation. Her statement, a ‘feeling of
anxiety which seemed to empty me’, is one of a ‘filled emotion’ while ‘in the future I
would try all I could to help my mother’ is an ‘expectant emotion’ that imagines herself
correcting the situation which causes hunger. Paradoxically, learning from hunger
causes a shift to the expectant counter-emotion of hope, in that Linke will ‘try and help’
her mother or perhaps all others ‘in the future’, because, like her mother, ‘I knew what
she felt’. Linke will come to learn and feel what other common man experienced
through deprivation, regardless of culture or geography. This learning is further
manifest in her autobiographies in France, Turkey and Latin America. ‘Hopelessness’ or
a temptation to ‘lie down and die’ will help guide her metamorphosis in the other
direction, toward a better future through imagining herself becoming a better person,
46
working with others toward a future-oriented concrete utopia. As a child she ‘suffered
the hunger without complaint’ but as an adult, when food queues had ‘burnt themselves’
into her memory, she took action to change the situation. In Bloch’s words: ‘Out of
economically enlightened hunger comes today the decision to abolish all conditions in
which man is an oppressed and long-lost being’ (p. 76). Linke’s evolution into a human
being working for the common good—an inherent ‘instinct’ for Veblen—when read
from Bloch’s point of view is Vor-Schein that has its roots in hunger. Hunger is of
‘revolutionary interest’ because it is a motivation to ‘change the situation which has
caused its empty stomach’ and is a means of self-preservation. In Bloch’s words:
Hunger cannot help continually renewing itself. But if it increases uninterrupted, satisfied by no
certain bread, then it suddenly changes. The body-ego then becomes rebellious, does not go out
in search of food merely within the old framework. It seeks to change the situation which has
caused its empty stomach, its hanging head. The No to the bad situation which exists, the Yes to
the better life that hovers ahead, is incorporated by the deprived into revolutionary interest. This
interest always begins with hunger, hunger transforms itself, having been taught, into an
explosive force against the prison of deprivation. Thus the self seeks not only to preserve itself,
it becomes explosive; self-preservation becomes self-extension (Emphasis added, p. 75-76).
Linke learned certain rebelliousness from hunger in that she wanted to end what caused
her empty stomach. In short, hunger helped her evolve from a ‘self-regarding’
individual to ‘other-regarding’ person to work collectively for the betterment of the
whole. Thus far, I placed emphasis on hunger. I now turn to ‘imbecile institutions’ as I
believe, although inimical to thriving, they were also instrumental in helping Linke
embrace life. But how did she recognize the coercion of these institutions?
Had Linke blindly followed her mother’s habit of mind, it is probable she would
have become a Nazi subordinate, like many others she knew, including Heinz. But
when she witnessed an alternative view to her mother’s view she began to question.
Fervent resistance and strikes, what Veblen termed ‘sabotage’ of the industrial system
against the vested interests by war-weary common man driven by hunger, deprivation,
poverty and anticipation of a better future, begot the November Revolution (1918). This
ended the war. The Bolshevik revolution bolstered German morale in those keen to
overturn the German monarchy and capitalism. Experience of class uprising offered an
alternative view, as instincts of purposeful work—toward equality, egalitarianism and
commonality—began to resurface over predatory habits. Common man directed their
anger not against the enemy but against the vested interests. Only twelve at the time, too
young to fully grasp the implications of class warfare, Linke recalled how the ‘fervent
resistance of the workers’ changed her outlook.
47
I only noticed the Revolution as far as it happened on our doorsteps. To me it seemed merely a
local affair. About a year later, the armed rebellion against the Republic led by Kapp was averted
by the general strike and the fervent resistance of the workers. In my memory these two events
are indissolubly fused, they broke into my childish life as one upsetting event and for the first
time I realized dimly the existence of a greater force beyond my own important self (RD 75).
Violent revolts ‘on her doorstep’ caused Linke to question what was happening, forcing
her to think beyond her ‘own important self’. She vividly recalled the uprising.
The factories in our district were on strike, the workers were armed; on the roof opposite our
house they set up a machine-gun. […] Then all of a sudden armoured cars stormed through the
road, and men shouted: “Clear the streets! Shut the windows! Leave the balconies!” […] A
second later the men in the car began to shoot, into the air, into the houses, along the street…
(RD 77).
She questioned the injustice of voluntary right-wing troops (Freikorps) directed at the
armed workers and futility in armed resistance after witnessing a horrible incident.
He was the first dead person I ever saw. I shuddered with disgust and confusion. There were
more people about in the street now, all looking quite ordinary, as if nothing had happened.
Perhaps they did not know. Someone had stepped into the little pool; a few bloody footprints
were on the pavement, growing paler and paler; the last was hardly visible. Suddenly the shock
took hold of me and I began to cry… (RD 81).
Linke sided with the workers. The experience became a life-long learning.
My mother always said all the Spartacists were murderers. But he could not be one he was
murdered himself. The other man had said it. The other man was a worker and looked very
anxious and worn out. I was fond of workers and simple people. They were kind and genuine
and never fussy like old aunts and fine grown-ups who always talked with children as if they
were half-wits. I hated them. But I could not hate the workers (RD 81).
While these tumultuous events clearly influenced Linke, her mother remained steadfast
in her mindset against the Socialists and Jews. ‘I can’t bear it—these traitors, these—
these villains’ (RD 76). Rather than console her daughter, Lucie chastised her, again
indicative of Veblen’s view of a ‘loyal populace’. Her mother scoffed: ‘Oh, these Red
bloodhounds. […] Stop crying—don’t waste your tears’ (RD 82). Later discovering a
Diary of Rosa Luxemburg on Lilo’s bookshelf, Lucie burned it and washed her hands
(RD 83). Lilo was often forced to resolve her emotions alone making her older than her
age, when she wrote:
So cruel, so hurting was life. […] nobody guided me. I was alone, my only companion, my only
governor, my only judge. My father was away, my mother was worried and weak, my teachers
were helpless under the strain of knowledge and understanding. And there was no God whom I
could have asked to hold me (RD 43).
Linke articulated how resistance by common man altered her habit of thought and might
be interpreted as her nascent political awakening. Class warfare became the catalyst to
break the spell of ‘honour’ and ‘national duty’ as a corrective to coercive habituation.
48
Too young to join the uprising, as a witness, how did her experiences of despair evolve
into daydreams of ‘anticipatory illumination’ of hope for a better life?
‘Man’s life is activity; and as he acts, so he thinks and feels’ (Veblen
1934/1964: 85). Not the emotion of hunger alone but also her ‘activity’ based on reason
and the instinct for ‘purposeful work’ afforded her new possibilities to daydream and to
direct her thinking toward the future. At this juncture there is a clear discrepancy
between Veblen and Bloch. Veblen believes humans ‘learn by habituation rather than
by precept and reflection’ (1919/1964: 15) whereas Bloch placed emphasis on emotion,
physiology and artifacts. To my mind, Linke became aware of coercive habituation
simply by experiencing it firsthand. As she met and spoke with common man about
their lives, new experiences caused her to reconsider her mother’s sentiment and the
habituation in which they lived. I suggest, she gradually arrived at what Rogoff calls
‘criticality’, or, in other words, ‘living out something while being able to see through it’
(2012). Common man must work for a livelihood. In war or peace, the rule is ‘businessas-usual’ (Veblen 1923/1964: 221 fn 11). Hoping to find purposeful work, when work
was scarce let alone purposeful, paradoxically, her experiences became illuminating.
The church offered youth a chance to earn a few marks by delivering letters to
those in arrears of the church tax. Collecting money, on behalf of the church, Linke
sarcastically called those she solicited money from her ‘customers’. When she knocked
on doors many responded: ‘Church? Pay? We’ve nothing to do with the church. Let the
rich pay. […] We haven’t a pfennig in the house’ (RD 102). Linke recalled: ‘Some gave
us a lecture on atheism, socialism, or communism, some just told us the misery of their
lives: poverty, hunger, hard and badly paid work or not work at all…’ (RD 102).
Common man proved to be the best educators. Linke admitted: ‘The stories we had
heard and experienced on the back stairs would have filled a first-hand book’ (RD 103).
After long deliberation about god, she reasoned: ‘I can’t believe in anything I don’t
understand’ (RD 105). Linke’s habit of mind changed, evident in the following passage.
‘After the confirmation I never went to church again, and in the future neither attended
“Ottchen’s” religious lesson nor the headmaster’s Monday morning sermons, which
since the Revolution were voluntary. I had definitely had enough of it’ (RD 109). Linke
learned something was wrong with the church in their habit of taking money from the
poor. The church, no longer a sacred place of worship, acted like a ‘business’ enterprise
and ‘swindle’, terms she used owing to experiences with coercive institutions. Harder
(2012) explains church practices at that time. Youth deemed ‘wayward’ or
49
degenerate were rounded up and put in Reformatories.28 Inmate ‘Paul K.’ experienced
the correctional institute firsthand, claiming it a ‘pretended religiosity’ fallen into ‘the
arms of the Christian Army recruiters’ (p. 17).
As the Inflation deepened, revolutionary fervor in Germany was replaced by
panic and mayhem. Clearly remembering what had happened in 1922, Linke wrote:
It was a world without security. We could scarcely see a day ahead. The country was in a state of
growing fear. The mark had begun to fall rapidly. Ordinary men and women could not
understand what was happening. It seemed to them that some sinister and uncontrollable force
was destroying the money in their pockets. Millions of people faced starvation. In the war they
had gone hungry, but now with hunger and the fear of hunger was mixed a frightful despair (RD
110).
These ‘sinister’ forces that Linke wrote of are the Vested Interests destroying the money
in their pockets. Vested Interests are predators looking for victims they can devour,
victims here meaning, not only individuals but also national economies they prey on to
undermine them by fixing prices on the stock market to accrue millions. In 1923, at the
peak of the inflation, Linke wrote how the lack of money further upset their home.
My mother was always lamenting that it was impossible for her to make both ends meet, my
father—whenever he was at home—always asking what the deuce she had done with all the
money he had given her yesterday. A few tears, a few outbreaks more did not make a difference
enough to impress me deeply. Yet, in the long run, the evil influence of the inflation, financially
as well as morally, penetrated even to me (RD 132).
Fritz Lang’s film Dr. Mabuse (1922) is an astute depiction of the vested interests
exerting financial terror in Weimar, and reducing common man to ruin. In 1922 German
stocks were extremely cheap (Voth 2003: 67). Despite some stabilization of the mark
after 1924, ‘stock market capitalism’ continued. Veblen’s cumulative causation
underlines ‘stock market capitalism’ to be an American ‘native bias’. By 1926 the
Reichsbank was greatly concerned funds were still being diverted from productive
national use to the stock market (p. 67) and that holdings in gold and foreign exchange
might easily take flight if foreign investors decided to ‘repatriate their financial gains’
(p. 67). Inflows of ‘hot money’ had their roots in ‘speculative balances lent principally
by American firms’ (p. 68). Alarmed that capital did not return to the economy,
‘[Hjalmar] Schacht [director of the Reichsbank] made scathing remarks about the
“luxury consumption” enjoyed by speculators who had made easy gains on the stock
market. […] For the Reich and the German economy, these foreign luxury imports, paid
28
Between 1921 and 1929 the number of reformatories swelled from 142 to 1,798, indicating many
restless youth were swept from the streets to allegedly put a good work ethic into them. In 1929 there
were a total of 131,773 beds. Twenty-three percent of reformatories were privately owned. Young girl
inmates were accused of moral offences as ‘fallen women’ (p. 13).
50
with capital gains from the stock exchange, are unhealthy and unbearable’ (p. 71).
Foreign investors, the ‘masters of financial intrigue’ (Veblen 1919/1964: 89) were
‘getting something for nothing’. In this manner, business ‘deranges the ordinary
conditions of life for the common man’ (p. 117).
Eyewitness to the inflation, Elias Canetti viewed it the ‘depreciation’ of the
individual. ‘Whatever he is or was, like the million he always wanted he becomes
nothing’ (1960/1981: 218). No one is exempt. ‘The process throws together people
whose material interests normally lie far apart. The wage-earner is hit equally with the
rentier’ (p. 218). Veblen’s use of the term ‘common man’ was not for nothing. For
Canetti, ‘[n]o one ever forgets a sudden depreciation of himself, for it is too painful.
Unless he can thrust it on to someone else, he carries it with him for the rest of his life’
(p. 219). In the Veblenian sense, unable to maintain any ‘standard of living’ the selfesteem of common man is crushed. It has far-reaching consequences. Linke wrote:
The middle class was hurt more than any other, the savings of a lifetime and their small fortunes
melted into a few coppers. […] Full of hatred, they accused the international financiers, the Jews
and Socialists—their old enemies of having exploited their distress. They never forgot and never
forgave and were the first to lend a willing ear to Hitler’s fervent preaching (RD 131-132).
Coupling Sneeringer’s findings with Veblen’s ideas on the shift from ‘other-regarding’
to ‘self-regarding’ particularly through consumerism, Linke clearly illustrated, the
middle class were all too willing to selfishly turn to Hitler for perceived stability.
Although the international financiers are blamed, not an incorrect accusation, statesmen
turned to themes of religion and ethnicity (statesmen here being the mouthpiece of the
vested interests) to sway the populace in favor of their political agenda.
Despite bleak prospects, Linke persisted with hope and determination to
embrace life. Upon graduation from lycée, she took a three-year apprenticeship at a
first-class bookshop with a lending library near Potsdamer Platz. Her narrative is a
hopeful future-oriented projection. ‘The world was like a polished apple, fresh and
colourful and juicy, and I wanted to get my teeth into it. I arrived at the library full of
expectation’ (RD 118)—an ‘expectant emotion’. Yet Linke’s present never delivered
what she hoped of a better future. Banished to the basement (as an apprentice) she
equated her work with that of ‘a subterranean mole, shoveling up hills of books instead
of fertile earth’ (RD 118). Humiliated, ‘I was not an errand-girl, I was an apprentice and
had gone to a secondary school’ (RD 119). Frustrated with the ‘spirit’ of the time, Linke
sarcastically referred to work as her ‘business career’ (RD 287). Eventually placed on
the shop floor, she familiarized herself with the clientele and learned much about
psychology by observing clients, distinguishing intellectuals from wealthy patrons. The
51
habit of ‘invidious comparison’ is prevalent in her narrative. ‘The title “doctor” did not
compare favourably with the glamour of the word “von”’ (RD 119). Common man’s
‘pecuniary emulation’ of the Leisure class institution also hoped to ‘get something for
nothing’. Linke wrote about the swindle.
Now the inflation came and destroyed the last vestige of steadiness. […] The whole population
had suddenly turned into maniacs. Everyone was buying, selling, speculating, bargaining, and
dollar, dollar, dollar was the magic word which dominated every conversation, every newspaper,
every poster in Germany. Nobody understood what was happening. There seemed to be no
sense, no rules in the mad game, but one had to take part in it if one did not want to be trampled
underfoot at once. Only a few people were able to carry through to the end and gain by the
Inflation. The majority lost everything and broke down, impoverished and bewildered (RD 131).
For example, in January 1919, the mark was 8.9 to the USD. By 15 November 1923 it
was 4,200,000,000,000 to the USD (Stolper 1940: 151). Prices and salaries fluctuated
daily. Desperate co-workers bought and resold books, changing marks into dollars to
partially recoup eroded salaries. Linke also joined the swindle yet was concerned it was
a ‘great fraud’. Like the Leisure class, common man turned to banditry, directed to do
so by the vested interests because ‘one had to take part in it if one did not want to be
trampled underfoot’. Common man’s sense of workmanship was further contaminated
by pecuniary gain through speculation on the stock market and earning money through
fluctuating currency exchange rates. Habits of others around her taught her the same
habit, like Veblen asserted of learning from habituation—behavioral conditioning, if
you will. A fellow co-worker scoffed at Linke, ‘…what a simpleton you are! […] The
boss doesn’t hesitate to take advantage of you, so why should you have any scruples to
do the same with him? We all do it […] Yes, all of them—on my word of honour’ (RD
145). Linke admitted, ‘I spent the money I “earned” on a new skirt, a velvet hat,
feminine accessories for my outfit, chocolates, and other luxuries. Linke became an avid
shopper. Everything I did was subordinated to the one purpose: to make myself more
attractive’ (RD 145). This is what Veblen meant by ‘invidious comparison’. Linke’s use
of ‘earned’ indicates an awareness her salary was not legitimately ‘earned’, but
accumulated through speculation, forced upon common man, to do the same to survive.
Hence Veblen made it clear, common man is ‘helpless within the rules of the game’
(1919/1964: 163). They are bound to lose. There is no ‘fair play’.
‘Pecuniary emulation’ became the new conformist habit, making those who
participated more ‘worthy’ by acquiring goods and those who couldn’t afford to
‘unworthy’. Consumerism left others starving in the street as common man no longer
worked purposefully for the community but directed work efforts to acquire new goods
52
produced by modern industry. Loberg (2013) posits Berlin ‘a highly commercialized
and formerly prosperous city afflicted by shortages, inflation, and rampant violence’.
Darkened street lights, tattered poster advertisements, street hawkers in shopping districts,
ramshackle kiosks, loitering crowds, and smashed display windows were the exemplary features
of this emergent cityscape. They reflected not only frustrated consumer desire but also deep
uncertainties about the future of capitalism (p. 367).
In spite of despair in the streets, Linke, like others, was enthralled by the spectacle and
learned the leisure habit of shopping for pleasure. ‘My eyes had lost their hungry look’
(RD 146). Physical hunger had been supplanted with consumer appetite. Although
advertising slogans are a directive to consume, there is no guarantee all do. ‘Semiotic
resistance’ writes John Fiske, ‘not only refuses the dominant meanings but constructs
oppositional ones that serve the interests of the subordinate is a vital a base for the
redistribution of power as is evasion’ (1989: 10). This false satisfaction was short lived
for Linke and some others. Resistance to the ‘American model of mass consumer
society’ was also a reality (Loberg p. 366). Linke’s following passage represents a
fundamental step in her evolution.
But I was getting slowly restless and nervous. A growing fear took hold of me. I could not go on
with all this swindle, I began to hate myself for it. I was wasting myself, I had to stop this kind
of life before I was completely lost. Yet it was difficult to get out of it (RD 146).
Despite learning the habit of consumerism (self-regarding), only by experiencing its
emptiness, did Linke eventually arrive at a feeling of dissatisfaction that influenced her
metamorphosis in the realization this endless ‘pecuniary emulation’ (Veblen) was
nothing other than a ‘swindle’ (Linke). Bloch’s ideas on utopic pre-appearances found
in popular culture, fashion and the like, appear sound—albeit in Linke’s case—
consumer goods only gave a momentary vision for a better future. Bloch’s thinking did
not account for countless others who further evolved into pecuniary beings—habitual
shoppers (self-regarding)—as Veblen asserted. While Linke stopped ‘this kind of life’
many others did not. For instance, in the early 1930s a young French woman Violette
Nozière murdered her working-class parents in Paris simply for money to buy the latest
fashions (Maza 2011). Paradoxically, as Linke lived amidst the ‘mad game’ the new
business ‘spirit’ that brought the Inflation, dwindling salaries, and the consumerist
spectacle, she learned from it and these experiences helped redirect her thinking.
Approached by a co-worker in the bookshop to join a group promising the
‘Creation of a New Community’ Linke became a member of the Trade Union for Shop
and Office Employees. ‘I plunged into a new but healthy adventure, and I was saved’
(RD 148). ‘Saved’ in this sense, implies saved from the emptiness and loneliness of
53
consumerism and self-regarding. She anticipated a chance for purposeful work with the
group. The union did not declare itself staunchly Left. To attract members it emulated
principles of the Wandervögel movement.29 Linke recalled: ‘From the time when the
Wandervögel in our school had not considered me worthy of an invitation to join them,
a feeling of inferiority was left in me. Of inferiority and of envy’ (RD 185). While the
union was not the official Wandervögel, she had a chance to overcome earlier feelings
of inferiority. Young members were expected to officially join the trade union once they
reached twenty-two years of age. Unlike the Wandervögel, union leaders were
responsible to the trade union; were to discuss trade union issues and accept only young
employees as members. Union activities exposed members to diverse organizations—an
alternative to the consumerism Linke experienced. The union struck a cord, tapping the
instinct to work for common good and a better future for Germans, in their youth
members. Linke explained.
This is what I wanted: to be a member of the group like all the others, perhaps one day to be
their leader, but to be like them, cut out of the same wood and modelled after the same image:
the Wandervögel, this simple, genuine, well-balanced being with its youthful standards of
values, its firm but optimistic outlook on life, its independence, its lack of reverence for outward
authority, and its defence of noble emotions (RD 151).
Reacting against the complexity of having to ‘keep up with appearances’ of ‘pecuniary
emulation’, Linke wanted to associate with those perceived genuine, independent, nonauthoritarian—simple and optimistic rather than pretentious and complex.
The local council organized cheap theatrical performances and light musical entertainment and
ballet shows and issued free tickets for the different youth organizations, from the Young
Nationals to the Young Socialists, from the Association for German Culture Abroad to the No
More War Movement, from the Boy Scouts to the nudists, from the Bible Circle to the
vegetarians and the Cyclists’ Union. We were all peacefully housed under the same roof (RD
152-153).
The experience introduced her to many others hoping to achieve the same end:
democratic society. ‘At that time we believed in the possibility of fair play and the
existence of a general willingness to achieve the common good’ (RD 153). This is a
clear indication Veblen’s instinct of good intention was still alive in the German youth.
However, when mass unemployment reached acute numbers in 1932, some drifted to
predatory habit under Hitler. Linke admitted: ‘It was many years later that we began to
pursue each other with the hatred of deadly enemies’ (RD 153). During her experiences
29
Wandervögel (migratory birds in German) was a movement founded in the late nineteenth century that
sought a return to nature, independence and freedom. Influenced by Romanticisms’ rejection of societal
restriction, youth hiked into nature and lived by spartan measure. Sewing their own ascetic clothes, the
group had a uniform appearance. Post WWI, Wandervögel leaders were disillusioned by the war. In the
late 1920s the Wandervögel came under the sway of Hitler.
54
with the union she wrote: ‘We should change the world, we should re-create it in a new
and better way’ (RD 154). This is a clear indication of Bloch’s idea of ‘anticipatory
illumination’ as Linke’s activity (in the Veblenian sense) helped her imagine becoming
a better person by engaging with the collective to become a better person—a concrete
utopia on the way to becoming through activity and experience.
Flourishing in the union, Linke became a youth leader at just nineteen. The
experience contributed positively to her metamorphosis. ‘I had to make friends, with
each of them, to get their confidence, and to arouse the consciousness of unity. From a
self-centered person I had to become a pedagogue, a model, and a leader, and yet a
friend’ (RD 168). This passage points to Linke’s awareness she was working to change
what she perceived as her self-centeredness. The union sent youth members on long
marches into the countryside to familiarize them with nature, collectivity and solidarity
to regain self-confidence and self-esteem using nature as a means of emotional
replenishment. Linke’s narrative tells of hiking throughout the night and singing songs.
A plentitude of frogs jumped out from the dense brush in the Klein-Bergedorf region.
Responsible for the girls in the group, she recalled: ‘Out of my memory the day rose
when as a little girl I had killed a toad [frog]. I shuddered. […] Be careful—don’t step
on them—don’t step on them!’ They took no heed, responding: ‘They are tough’. Linke
felt pained (Fig. 5). ‘Was there no mercy’ (RD 166)? To my mind, this simple but
tenderly recalled incident acts as a marker to indicate her changed habit of thought.
Moreover, it is a foreboding passage, as it appears youth who grew up like Linke still
couched predatory behavior, in how they willingly crushed the frogs, just as the
Freikorps had crushed the armed workers. Linke, on the other hand, remembered her
past mistakes and worked to correct them in the present in anticipation of a better
future. Embracing life, Linke fostered both an individual and collective hopefulness.
We were all young, less than twenty years of age, a good type of youth, healthy and radiant, full
of gaiety and yet sincere, and, above all, alive right to our finger-tips. We were tense with
electricity, and crackled at the slightest touch (RD 197).
I equate her expression of emotions as progressive and vastly different from selfregarding ones she had previously learned from consumerism and war. The experience
compensated for her unfulfilled employment at the bookshop. Activity with the trade
union was experiential learning and assisted her projection toward a better future. But
this too, was short-lived, as Linke began to recognize cracks in the façade of the
promised ‘new community’.
55
But at the same time this individual was subordinated to something greater than itself: the group.
And the group was only a part of the whole movement, which stood again humbly in a greater
community. There was freedom, but there was also sacrifice. We chose our leader, but after we
had chosen we had to follow him. This was one of the hardest things for me to learn (RD 151).
Why was following the leader the ‘hardest’ thing for Linke to learn? I cannot know this
completely, however I argue in chapter four, her insubordinate spirit did not favor being
subordinate to anyone. In fact, Linke may have had some narcissistic tendencies. Oddly,
Linke’s text points to a ‘proud wish for power’ in her early days, but as I have
articulated she questioned these emotions. As an adult she fled institutions sensed to be
authoritarian, simply refusing to subordinate. This might have caused her to start and
end participation with them. Thus, her narrative appears contradictory, a device Linke
employed to provoke her reader to perhaps question their narcissistic tendency. On the
one hand, the union habituated youth to a concrete utopia of a new community, but on
the other, such excursions became a means to subordinate youth or redirect their restless
spirit. She explained: ‘The reason for this restlessness might be that the misery of war
and revolution and inflation had depressed us too long and that everyone was not in
pursuit of some personal happiness. One joined groups in the hope that they might have
a recipe for the best method to achieve it and because one was afraid not to be alone’
(RD 180). At this time, these groups were progressive providing an outlet for the youth
to imagine a better future.
One of these events was a national gathering of all youth groups in Stralsund on
the Baltic seaboard in August 1924 (RD 184). Stralsund was important because it was in
the free state of Prussia (1918-1932)—democratic at that time. Five thousand members
assembled (RD 193). Linke recalled the speech delivered by the union leader.
Hail to all of you, friends! […] how could our union exist without you, the young ones? […]
This summer school will give you an opportunity to make yourself more intimately acquainted
with the history and aims of our great union. At the same time we shall be conscious of the fact
that only a joyful spirit can conquer life, and therefore we shall dance and sing and play and
carry out the preliminary competitions for Stralsund. […] ‘Stralsund!’ is the battle-cry all over
Germany. […] be always conscious of our movement’s device: ‘Only unity gives strength!’ I
herewith declare the week-end school open. Hail’ (RD 187-188)!
Youth sang, marched and exhibited their talent in arts and sports. Linke was responsible
for the east of Berlin girls’ group. The event fostered relations with union members and
helped Linke project toward a better future. She wrote the feeling of collectivity.
We lost our own shape and significance and yet, at the same time, regained a new one. We were
enormously proud of our companions and of our common cause, we seemed to be superior to
those who did not belong to us because we wore a badge and had a slogan which we could
follow. We were lifted out of anonymity by belonging to a publicly appreciated and
acknowledged association, lifted out of the loneliness of individuality into the comradeship of
the thousands who stood like a wall between us and the chaotic world (RD 196).
56
Being part of the crowd brought feelings of jubilation and security against loneliness. In
his cumulative study on crowds, Canetti wrote: ‘There is nothing man fears more than
the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able
to recognize or at least classify it. […] All the distances which men create round
themselves are directed by this fear’ (1960/1981: 15). Only by being in the crowd does
he overcome the fear of being touched. ‘As soon as a man has surrendered himself to
the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch’ (p. 16). German youth, as Linke, overcame even
if momentarily, feelings of fear against authoritarianism, be it the dictates of new
consumerism, coercive political wrangling or increased militarism.
Yet, the trade union experience also led to her ‘criticality’ of them. Writing in
1934 she could see how the situation had changed. On-lookers cheered from Stralsund
balconies: ‘Hail! …optimistic spirit of youth… joyfully doing their duty… employees
standing in the midst of life… work honours… unity gives strength’ (RD 199)! In this
passage is the ‘collective of prestige’ but also the collective tainted with ‘honour’ and
‘duty’, German ‘native bias’ in the present. While I have little doubt Linke and the
collective worked for genuine good, unfortunately, their democratic goals were to be
misdirected in the 1930s. Her skepticism speaks naturally to Bloch’s. According to
Zipes, Bloch supported the Left but kept a critical distance from the party.
Bloch felt that one reason why the fascists were able to gain control in Germany was that the
communists spent more time attacking the social democrats and spreading meaningless,
rhetorical propaganda than addressing the needs, dreams, and wants of the German people. […]
Since the Communist party and other left organizations relied on empty slogans and called for
paternalistic programs that failed to speak to basic human needs, it was no wonder that the
people turned to National Socialism with its mythic ideology and concrete welfare programs
(1996: xviii).
The National Socialists were able to touch common man where the Left had failed to do
so. NSDAP preyed on the emotions of rejection and fear.
Nevertheless, the experience helped Linke project ‘anticipatory illumination’
toward the future, drawing her own conclusions for how she might use this learning in
the future. The experience became a template for what an alternative imagined utopia
might be. In her words, ‘I had never been happier in all my life. I was carrying the sun
in my body as a healthy woman carries a child’. She expelled old conventions of
habitual thought. ‘I felt as if I had gone through a thorough process of cleaning and
polishing which had rid me of all kinds of superfluous conventions, inhibitions, and
complexes and had produced a being ‘fresh as a new pin’ (RD 176). Returning to Berlin
from Stralsund, she recalled a daydream in her ‘ambition to stand above the crowd […]
but at that moment it was not even clearly known to myself’. Her daydream is
57
commensurate with Bloch’s ‘anticipatory illumination’ projected toward a future utopia
in imagining herself a better person who will also help others emancipate themselves.
I shifted from one tired foot to the other and dreamt, dreamt—I saw myself a great woman, and
inspiring leader in whom thousands put their trust, and in my heart the will for sacrifice and
service was inseparably mixed with the ambition to stand above the crowd and to make them
follow me towards a goal that I had designed for all of us; but at that moment it was not even
clearly known to myself. […] Forward, forward, we have far to go to find the blue flower near
the ridge of the mountains. If you get tired, I shall encourage and support you, but forward,
follow me (RD 178)!
This points to a hidden ambition or anticipation to lead for common good. This excerpt
was immediately followed by a vivid description of the east of Berlin, her reality.
The train rolled through the suburbs of Berlin—ugly houses, factories, waste pieces of land.
Then nothing but the grey rocks of tenements, moving closer and closer towards the railway line
until the engine puffed desperately for lack of breathable air and slipped at last exhausted into
the dark hole of the station hall (RD 178).
Her expectant emotion is a daydream of hope out of former hunger. ‘Our own room is
pre-figured here, the free life that is coming’, posed Bloch (1986: 22). Mention of
‘superior’ is important as Linke’s later ‘fortunate encounters’ and journeys help
overcome the feeling of inferiority. These journeys not only ensure physical selfpreservation but are also a secret space of emotional self-preservation.
Unable to tolerate deteriorating work conditions at the bookshop, a friend from
the union arranged a contact for Linke at the Young Democratic League in Berlin
(youth wing of the DDP) (RD 275). The experience would habituate her in party politics
and political institutions. Negotiating a living wage for herself with DDP members, an
ambitious Linke asserted: ‘I am not just a typist [...] I am a skilled organizer and would
help you in the Berlin groups, and I could also do some political work, I think I am
quite a good speaker’ (RD 283). They were impervious. She began as a typist to the
secretariat on the National Board of Young Democrats in 1926. The Youth League
regarded itself more Left than the Social Democrats (RD 365) and functioned relatively
independent of the DDP. Responsible for giving lectures, writing pamphlets and
organizing youth, she soon realized her lack of knowledge in history and politics as
‘void deserts in my education’ (RD 287) divulging ‘I could truthfully say that my
stomach was as empty as when I had started ten years before’ (RD 288). She and her
friends were ‘forced not only to learn but to act’ (Emphasis added, RD 293). Prior to
Hitler’s entry into the Reichstag (1933), it was a time of ‘intensest political excitements’
(RD 298). Permanent crisis become habitual (RD 325). Pacifists and the Left pushed a
plebiscite for expropriation of ex-princes (RD 293). Civil law declared ‘estates and
58
castles and works of art wholly private property. The decision was always in favour of
the princes, and the impoverished State had to pay’, remarked Linke (RD 294).
Not yet twenty and unable to vote, she campaigned vigorously for the plebiscite
visiting the same homes approached earlier to collect the church tax. Political debate
around issues of the national flag, secular education and rearmament fomented
hostilities across the political spectrum, frustrating Linke’s hope for a ‘German
Republic united in brotherhood and governed in social justice and liberty’ (RD 310). As
poverty increased the Left sought to galvanize power with a campaign to return German
state money to common man through expropriation of the ex-princes. The center and
Left parties attempted to unite but conservatives refused to cooperate. A fifty percent
vote would allow the German Supreme Tribunal (Reichsgericht) to pass an
expropriation bill. To get the bill passed the government needed either Left or Right
support. When the DDP sided with the Left, they were accused of reigniting
Bolshevism. The conservative DNVP (Deutschnationalen Volkspartei) pushed their
agenda while the ‘National Socialists moved an amendment: the “princes of the banks
and the Stock Exchange” should be likewise expropriated’ (RD 295). Money touched
the hearts and minds of Germans. Prior to the June ballot, Hindenburg confused the
agenda by raising an issue of flag usage. The former empire flag (black-red-white) was
to be flown alongside the Weimar flag (black-red-gold). This furthered disunity,
igniting Junkers, clergymen and employers to pressure voters against the plebiscite.
In 1927 Linke became an official DDP member and was invited to speak at the
women of Berlin branches (RD 336). Coaxed by a Youth League member, she founded
three groups, two in the east of Berlin and one in Potsdam (RD 336). She spoke to a
girls’ youth group, declaring: ‘German youth repudiates coercion. It believes in freedom
and therefore democracy. […] We shall not rest until we have created the State of
tomorrow with work and freedom and happiness for all’ (RD 343). In 1928, she
campaigned with Georg Bernhard—editor of Vossische Zeitung—and delivered a
speech at Eberswalde (RD 361). Feeling ‘deeply confused’ (RD 363) by political party
rhetoric, she admitted: ‘Not for a moment did I consider turning Communist, but I knew
that the truth must lie somewhere in that direction’ (RD 363). In the 1929 election, she
campaigned with the Youth League joining a caravan of cars, distributing leaflets to
encourage DDP votes and called out slogans like ‘Confound Nazi tricks, Vote number
six’ (RD 369)! Stahlhelm blocked their road. A confrontation ensued but in this instance
did not become violent (RD 369-70).
Linke conceded of all her efforts in politics: ‘We believed we were the vanguard
59
of a new and free Germany, but we were merely a few regiments rallied to cover the
retreat’ (RD 294). Disgusted by DDP consent to Weimar building a cruiser prohibited
under the Treaty of Versailles and for undermining their pacifist stance (RD 351), with
‘criticality’ Linke remarked: ‘I saw how it had come to this. I understood. I had watched
the constantly recurring difficulties too long now to condemn anyone without
consideration. But I was no longer willing to take part in the game’ (RD 377). She left
politics the next day. Yet her participation in the political ‘game’ led to a fortunate
encounter with Gustav Stolper who would dramatically influence her life.
In sum, Linke’s experiences and the experience of writing them up was a praxis
of ‘self-encountering’ that caused her eventual ‘criticality’ toward Weimar habituation.
Questioning her emotions and acts, Linke recognized her journey toward evolving the
self. Despite a tendency toward narcissism like much of her society, Linke forever
struggled against subordination to authoritarianism. Eventually settling in Ecuador (Fig.
6), she told friends: ‘I have settled here because in Ecuador I can do what I want to
do’.30 Linke had found her home (Heimat) (Fig. 7). For Bloch, Heimat meant a
completion, the ‘goal of an upright gait’ toward overcoming ‘exploitation, humiliation,
oppression and disillusionment’ (1996: xxvii). Oddly, Linke’s future Andean Heimat
evolved out of an anticipatory illumination, imagined on her train journey back to
Berlin from Stralsund. As we recall, Linke imagined a ‘blue flower near the ridge of the
mountains’—the opening quote to this chapter. Quito rests in the Andean Mountains,
whose skirts are blanketed with Lupinus plants bearing blue-purple flowers. At the time
Linke wrote this passage she would have had no way of knowing she would eventually
live in Ecuador. Linke’s autobiography was a story of evolution from hunger to hope.
30
Newspaper article published in 1976 authored by a close friend of Linke’s in Ecuador. I cannot cite the
newspaper and the sender wishes to remain anonymous.
60
—Chapter 3—
‘Fortunate Encounter[s]’
A Chance to Learn
I do not know what would have become of me without
Anne. Perhaps uncontrolled sentimentalities might have led
me the same way as my family, my school-friends, and—as
it seems at the moment—the majority of my countrymen:
into the arms of the Nazis.
—Lilo Linke (RD 100)
Drawing from Linke’s autobiographical narratives this chapter examines the ways in
which she learned in and outside educational institutions. School experiences were
habituated in WWI, the November Revolution and Inflation. I explore the contradictory
ways in which her school was both used as a site of learning and eliciting consent to
war. This is followed by my interpretation of her learning experiences outside the
institution where I suggest Goethe’s notion of ‘fortunate encounter[s]’ (1995: 18-21)
offered a chance to learn by unlearning a learned inferiority taught at school, what
Rancière calls ‘stultification’ (1991: 109). I am interested in how fortunate encounters
may have contributed to her struggle against, and evolution beyond, ‘self-regarding’
pecuniary emulation sought in obtaining goods to instead embrace ‘other-regarding’
instincts of solidarity and community livelihood (Dugger and Sherman 2000: 149). This
was Veblen’s vitrolic arugment against business civilization (Öncü 2009). Linke’s
evolution cultivated a new way of seeing and being, not so unlike Goethe’s scientific
method ‘delicate [tender] empiricism’ Zarte Empirie (Goethe 1995: 307). Linke
cultivated these encounters, what Goethe termed ‘vitally interlocking relationships’
(Bywater 2005: 298)31 to foster emancipatory participation with common man
regardless of culture and geography.
With Prussia at war, one might wonder what kind of education the young Linke
received at the eight hundred all-girl Schule an der Victoriastadt in Friedrichsfelde, in
the east of Berlin. Linke told of these contentious school years in Restless Days, in a
31
Goethe’s essay ‘Our Undertaking is Defended’ (1807) in 1817 became the introduction to his work on
morphology (cited in Bywater p. 297).
61
chapter titled ‘War School 1914-1918’. Educated at this institution for ten years, she
graduated from lycée in 1923 at sixteen (RD 110). A teacher training college was
attached to the institution (RD 64). Typical of the epoch, education was gender-divided
in Prussia. Our habitual mindset might assume an all-girl school less authoritative and
militaristic than an all-boy one, but we soon learn her teachers and headmaster thought
‘highly of discipline and subordination’ (RD 63), perhaps typical in wartime. Beyond
regular lessons of arithmetic, German, history, religion and French, as well as singing,
drawing, needlework and gymnastics (RD 113) female students participated in the war
effort. They collected everything from brass latches and bones to plum stones and
stinging nettles to be recycled as war provisions (RD 62). ‘Some of the teachers valued
a copper pot higher than a faultless translation from the French’, Linke recalled (RD
62). Those collecting the most were given ‘a book or a framed picture of Hindenburg or
a diploma’ (RD 62). Under teacher supervision female students were assigned a soldier,
whom they wrote letters to on the front line and sent packages of tobacco, ersatz
chocolate, their photograph and a cross to boost soldier morale. When soldiers were
injured, students visited the hospital. When a soldier died, they visited the grave.
German children were not shielded from the horrors of war but rather were actively kept
focused on the whole experience. ‘I lived in such abnormal times that I had seen death
before I had ever seen life’ (RD 99). Paradoxically, involvement in the war effort—
mandatory at her educational institution—might be conceived as a coerced ‘experiential
learning’ (Dewey 1938), tainted with the religiosity of a ‘holy duty’ to the Fatherland
(RD 68), practiced to reinforce an economy of order for the order of war.
During the post-1870 impetus for state building, mass education became the
main enterprise aimed at politically constructing society and its citizens as oriented
toward progress (Meyer et al, 1992: 129). To believe education would bring freedom
and progress to the German nation when students were half-starved must have required
a great leap of faith. How could one fathom learning under such compromised
conditions? ‘Some began to come barefooted to school, in normal times a revolutionary
attack on the dignity of the institute’ (RD 71). Education wasn’t a normative means of
consent to bourgeois hegemony in the Gramscian sense. With Prussia at war, the
institution became a repressive apparatus of control in the Althusserian sense, not unlike
the police or army. It is little surprise Linke described school as, ‘more a prison than a
house for little girls’ (RD 61).
Marjorie Lamberti (2002) points out, education was the central focus of
political-cultural contestation that began in the Wilhelmine Empire (1890-1918),
62
reached fever pitch after the November Revolution (1918) and continued in the Weimar
Republic (1919-1933). For Lamberti much of this period has been underestimated in
historical literature on pedagogy and politics. ‘[A]ctivists of the German Teachers’
Association can undisputedly claim the central place in a historical account of the
school reform movement since 1900’ (p. 1). After 1908, educational reform became a
movement for progressive education, known as the New Pedagogy Neue Pädagogik (p.
11). The movement aimed to equalize education for boys and girls with a focus on
student participation; to abolish class privileges of elite preparatory schools; and
question the need for religious education, Konfessionelle Schule (inherited from
Bismarck’s Kulturkampf) to make all schools secular Weltliche Schule (p. 59) or
common schools Regelschule (p. 61). Education would be ‘emancipation from the
church’ (p. 26). But Pastors and conservatives accused reformists of ‘hostility’ toward
religion (p. 27). Scheck (2004) points out conservatives and the right actively
campaigned against socialists and social democrats, blaming them for tainting German
youth toward internationalist and Bolshevist ideas that sought to sweep away Germans
and the German nation. Hence Linke’s school experiences were set in a highly volatile
period. But her narrative makes it clear subordination and religion was exercised.
Students curtsied. Teachers bowed. Heels clicked to authority. Hymns were sung—all
habits of honor and servile prestige—Veblen’s premise about German cultural
inheritance. After the November Revolution on 29 November 1918 school religious
practices were prohibited (RD 109; Lamberti p. 45).
Poverty in the spring of 1917 became unbearable, particularly in the east of
Berlin but also in the working-class districts of the mass unemployed in Wedding and
Neukölln (Föllmer 2009: 209). Armed street battles ensued between police and
revolutionary workers in Linke’s neighborhood. ‘The authorities thought it advisable to
garrison a battalion in our district in order to ensure enthusiasm’ (RD 71). Further
surveillance was implemented. Even before the November Revolution there was much
agitation from teachers because of declining salaries (Lamberti p. 44) that might
indicate the decision for surveillance measures at schools were not, perhaps, only for
students but also for teachers. ‘All the schools in the neighbourhood formed a lane to
welcome the soldiers, the pupils of the four secondary schools near the town hall and
the adjoining barracks, the others farther behind’ (RD 71). A young, wounded
Lieutenant Bernhard Fink replaced the head mistress Miss Mullerthal who suddenly
died (RD 69). His classroom presence—sign of military power—caused a stir with
adolescent female students. Capturing their attention with heroic war stories, Linke
63
recalled he ‘faced death more than a dozen times’. ‘[O]ur mouths were open with
amazement. […] The uniform fitted him like a young god, and he was not merely an
ordinary hero, but an airman’ (RD 68-69).
Following the November Revolution that ended the war, the opposition—
coalition of Catholics, DDP and SDP—replaced a defeated Junker-bourgeoisie alliance.
Confronted by progressive demands to create a new type of man, with new ideas and a
new structure for society (Borinski 2014: 48), mass demonstrations, strikes and riots
were common, as the old order was not yet ousted. Education became a locus for
change and was one of the most contested sites of political debate for educational
reforms. According to educationalist Fritz Borinski, the adult education movement
Volkshochschule was characterized by social realism and akin to a ‘spiritual movement’
(p. 50) driven by spontaneity, dynamism, critical thought and a social attitude to work
for a democratic ‘common wealth’ to supersede the old ‘attitude of uncritical optimism
and snobbery, mass entertainment, and uncreative neutrality which regarded adult
education as social welfare’ (p. 55). The movement influenced educational institutions
at all levels and comprised part of Linke’s school experience. School Councils were one
such experiment. ‘Upper forms [...] were asked by the Ministry of Education each to
elect a representative out of their midst who should act as a mediator between them and
their teachers’. Relying on an atmosphere of ‘goodwill’ mediators avoided ‘discontent’
(RD 87). Linke was elected a council member by her form. Students were to
independently develop interest groups in literature and drama. But teachers showed
little faith in their abilities and initiatives, shadowed their every move and curtailed
activities. Linke concluded: ‘The council was a snake without teeth—it could only
cringe, but not bite’ (RD 88). So there was effectively a tension between militaristic
schooling and progressive movements for education reform.
In March 1923 Linke graduated with best marks in all subjects (RD 113). Linke
wrote that only three female students in her form stayed at home following graduation.
Some of them went to secretarial colleges for a yearlong shorthand typist program while
most took apprentice positions in shops, offices and banks (RD 117), reflecting ideas
about the emergent new woman (Neue Frau) and the increasing employment of women
in the postwar. Possibilities were available for young women at a plethora of new
business colleges, as there was a demand for female economists. Linke opted out. ‘The
idea of spending six more years in classrooms and lecture halls was simply repulsive. I
had finished with that kind of education’ (RD 117). Free from ‘jail’ as she called it, ‘I
had hated going to school, hated being rebuked and moulded and educated after
64
somebody else’s will’ (RD 113).
It would be unfair to single out German education as a unique case. Rancière
points to education in general as a ‘locus of class division’ (1991: xvii). Moreover he
states: ‘War is the law of the social order’ (p. 82). For him: ‘Social irrationality finds its
formula in what could be called the paradox of the ‘“superior inferiors”: each person is
subservient to the one he represents to himself as inferior, subservient to the law of the
masses by his very pretension to distinguish himself from them’ (p. 86). It is a
stultifying vision of the world, ‘when we believe in the reality of inequality’ (p. 109). In
this sense, explicators teach inequality and are accomplices to war. ‘To explain
something to someone is first of all to show him he cannot understand it himself. […] a
world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones […] the intelligent and the stupid’
(p. 6). Linke’s history and religion teacher used these methods. ‘He tried hard to help us
on to the right way—words, words, words poured down on us, and when his own
speech ran dry, with his last whisper before the bell rang he recommended books to
continue the task of education. Not a single girl ever read them’ (RD 91). Linke,
although I cannot speak for other students, found difficulty in making a connection
between what she was taught at school and the real world outside.
As an outsider interpreting Linke’s experiential stories, although paradoxical, I
think there might have been an aspect of ‘fortune’ in her institutional education during a
time of extreme incongruities in Prussia and later Weimar, not because so many poor
souls never attended school while Linke did, but rather, experiencing such gross
contradictions might have provoked ‘criticality’. Linke was able to learn not only the
role of institutional education in shaping the individual as subordinate to power but also
to gradually cultivate what Borinski defines ‘what ought to be’ as a ‘realistic education
for life’ outside the institution. Linke’s suffering became a ‘knowing’—Walter
Benjamin’s Erfahren (1999: 731). While ‘war school’ taught a forced sense of
responsibility to care for others, albeit only fellow Germans, this need not imply such
learning will never be used by the oppressed as new ways to make meaning, to subvert,
to rethink, to reuse, such knowledge against authority for betterment of common man.
Linke might very well have learned dedication to humanity through this odd
‘experiential learning’ (Dewey). In my view, Linke’s experiences of overt state
repression likely contributed to her skepticism and suspicion of authority, what Veblen
thought natural between ‘common man’ and the ‘vested interests’ (1919/1964). Her
admittance, ‘never to write a silly essay, to learn French grammar, to feel inferior in the
gymnasium, never to crib, never to be afraid, to be threatened by bad marks or rebukes
65
in the form book, never to do dull homework’ (RD 113) expressed what many of us can
relate to about school. Rancière’s assertions about education mirror her experiences, as
teachers, in the role of ‘explicators’ engage in the ‘stultification’ of students. As we will
see, when Linke experienced alternative learning (with a fortunate encounter) to the
‘irrational’ superior-inferior, a sense of emancipation for a chance to learn took hold.
Encountering Anne
At a children’s nursing home in the Riesengebirge in 1920, just as the Inflation
was poised to devastate the German middle-class (Stolper 1940: 151), Linke met Anne,
a sixteen year-old daughter of a Jewish scientist, her first fortunate encounter. ‘She was
the most unobtrusive person one can imagine, yet her influence on me worked like the
chisel of a sculptor...’ For the first time someone took genuine interest in sharing with
Linke. ‘She allowed me to read her books—poems by Rilke and Stefan George,
Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, a few modern plays and essays’. Manifest as a new
way of learning: ‘Only by knowing Anne was I able to understand what I read’. Anne
was ‘carefully educated and intelligent far beyond her age’, Linke observed (RD 99). At
school Goethe’s poems and Schiller’s St. Joan had been taught as the struggle between
‘inclination and duty’ (RD 90) of which Linke grasped little. But of learning through a
personal influence she confessed:
(In fact, all my learning never happened in a one-and-one-is-two-way, but only in connection
with a personal influence.) She helped me to discover that sentiments need not be sentimental,
that a restless heart and spirit have to be checked by form and knowledge, and—most important
of all—that respect, logic, and justice are the qualities which alone are able to regulate the
anarchy of man in a humane and livable way (RD 99-100).
Despite trepidation, Lilo accepted Anne’s invitation to her Berlin home and ‘…after a
few more visits I had conquered my shyness and received some object lessons in good
behaviour’. Linke experienced something she didn’t know existed. ‘I had never been in
a house where book-shelves were the chief furniture and where everything was selected
with care and dignity’ (RD 100). A world normally unfamiliar to many like Linke,
Anne’s middle-class home was so unlike Linke’s where her mother’s piano served as a
‘hero gallery’ (RD 30) of Hindenburg and Ludendorff portraits. Eventually drifting
from Anne, she never forgot the encounter as it exposed her to habits she wasn’t
normally habituated to. The experience of a possibility to learn made a lasting
impression on her.
66
Certainly all this was not quite so clear to me at that time, and it did not change my confused
and selfish character from one day to the next. But somehow in the future I knew about the
existence of this truth, it directed my outlook, and I could never completely forget it (RD 100).
Her encounter reveals several insights into learning and experience that might provide a
partial answer to the question Dewey posed (1938).32 ‘What is the place and meaning of
subject-matter and of organization within experience’ (p. 20)? First, the experience
exposed Linke, through a ‘personal influence’, to Anne’s alternative knowledge about
literature. We cannot know what the two discussed but it appears Anne’s knowledge of
Goethe, Rilke and George was more relevant for ‘real’ life learning over Rancièrean
‘stultification’ of the subject-matter taught in the classroom, utterly divorced from life.
Linke pointed out earlier her history teacher used Goethe’s poems to teach ‘duty’ and
subordination to the state. No education is neutral, according to Paulo Freire as
pedagogy is a political act. ‘Liberation is a praxis: the action and reflection of men and
women upon their world in order to transform it’ (1970/1996: 60). In my view, the
experience between the two adolescents undermined the teaching at state institutions
and represents a radical political act. Without experiencing subject matter through a
personal influence, Linke might have never cultivated ‘criticality’. Recall her quote at
the beginning of the chapter ‘uncontrolled sentimentalities’ had led her countrymen
‘into the arms of the Nazis’. Linke could see clearer than fellow countrymen the future
of Germany. Second, Linke defined herself as a ‘selfish’ character, indicative of a
growing self-awareness and nascent self-reflexive journey to evolve toward a more
‘other-regarding’ person. Impossible to measure to what extent Linke accomplished this
goal, her desire for and willingness to work toward such an end is crucial. Third, the
assertion ‘respect, logic, and justice’ guide man in a ‘humane and livable way’ and that
‘existence of this truth’ was to be found in knowledge, indicates Linke’s use of
rationality, over irrational acts she witnessed, namely, Howitzer trenches in her
neighborhood as class warfare ensued between revolutionary workers and Freikorps.
One considers how a student in the east of Berlin might have concentrated on a
book or school lessons. Habituated to social and political polarization between the Left
and Right that eventually saw the rise of Nazism (Baranowski 2000: 1158), certainly
Anne and Linke would have sensed some form of angst, intolerance and hatred—
whether in the east or west of Berlin—although tensions might have been more
pronounced in everyday life in the east. Their encounter might have fostered a common
‘knowing’ (Erfahren) as the two transcended prejudice—Germans of German Jews and
32
John Dewey’s seminal work on education first appeared in Democracy and Education (1916)
comprising his main theories. Experience and Education (1938) incorporated his earlier ideas.
67
German Jews of Germans—additionally melting divisions between the classes. Dewey
suggested, ‘personal experiences may mean more multiplied and more intimate contacts
[…] more, rather than less, guidance by others’. Dewey referred to ‘continuity’ and
‘interaction’ as two principles for learning from experience (1938: 42). ‘An experience
is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and
what, at the time, constitutes his environment […] whatever conditions interact with
personal needs, desires, purposes, and capacities to create the experience which is had’
(p. 43-44). Dewey developed ‘a well thought-out philosophy of the social factors that
operate in the constitution of individual experience’ (p. 21). The social in which Linke
learned, i.e., oppression and the dire situation of Prussia at war prioritized the necessity
of a ‘personal influence’. Their learning encounter might be akin to the praxis of Freire.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970/1996) Freire challenged ‘explication’ from
another angle. The problem lay not in the institution itself but in how teachers taught.
He called it ‘bank knowledge’. Students were mere containers to be filled by the teacher
where reciprocal learning of the teacher-student and student-teacher was problematic (p.
53). Born into poverty, Freire believed the oppressed suffered ‘dehumanization’ by
oppressors but could teach themselves out of oppression and ‘recover their lost
humanity’ (p. 26). Working from within the institution, Freire asserted that teachers
could challenge the institution by creating new teacher-student-teacher relationships of
reciprocal learning. Rancière, on the other hand, radically rejected institutional
education altogether claiming those with the will, capable of teaching themselves. I
suggest Freire’s teaching philosophy somewhat mirrored ‘tender empiricism’ and
‘fortunate encounter’ with the profound idea knowledge needn’t dominate and control,
as Goethe criticized of Descartes rational man. Not to be ‘filled’ by a teacher in teacherstudent classroom ‘stultification’, Anne and Lilo’s student-student relation might very
well have became a reciprocal and radical act that introduced Linke for the first time to
a love of learning—along the lines of Greek philosophia ‘love of wisdom’. Lilo’s
curiosity filled Anne’s need for sharing. Should Anne’s sharing be misconstrued as
charity, Freire was careful to distinguish between the fearful who ‘extend their
trembling hands’ for ‘false charity’ with ‘human hands which work and working,
transform the world’ (p. 27). Experiences with Anne might have helped Lilo recover her
‘lost humanity’ by overcoming a learned inferiority at school and through class
stratification, played out in everyday class warfare in the streets.
Why should the encounter of these two young women be any different from that
of Goethe and the German writer Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) when they met in 1788
68
(Goethe 1995: 321 fn 7) just as the French Revolution was about to set Europe ablaze?
In fact, Goethe’s scientific method ‘tender empiricism’, Zarte Empirie, evolved out of
their ‘fortunate encounter’ when Schiller suggested his study on plant morphology was
not just observation but an ‘idea’ in itself. Schiller had helped further Goethe’s thinking
on how ‘experience’ was congruent with an ‘idea’ and that elements must connect the
two. Goethe admitted this set in motion an ‘enduring union rich in benefit to us and to
others’ (Goethe 1995: 20). This implies learning is not a selfish act but a social act that
benefits the whole. The ten-year friendship that followed until Schiller’s death
developed Goethe’s aptitude for philosophy and helped him arrive at the conclusion,
human development did not happen in a well-defined process of stages but in a series of
‘wrong turns, twisting roads, hidden ways, and finally of the unintended jump, the
energetic leap which takes us to a higher level of understanding’. Thousands of
encounters, too numerous to record, contribute to a ‘purer, freer state of self-awareness’
(p. 21). The Goethe-Schiller encounter is a meaningful exchange as between any two
individuals, if it takes them to a higher level of self-awareness, in this case, Linke’s
experience with Anne. Here, Dewey’s first principle of ‘continuity’ for interpreting
experience as an educational force and function argued, ‘every experience lives on in
further experiences’ (1938: 27).
Encountering Gustav
In January 1929 Gustav Stolper hired Linke as a typist at his reputable theorybased economic journal Der Deutsche Volkswirt (1926-1933) co-founded with political
scientist and economist Joseph Schumpeter. Attracting high profile figures and
intellectuals from across Europe, writers contributed articles on economy, politics,
history, culture, psychology and sociology.33 The journal welcomed diverse political
opinion even if it differed from the editors. Stolper used the Volkswirt as a platform for
his activities in the Reichstag as a DDP Deutsche Demokratische Partei, parliament
member for Hamburg (Wenhold 2011: 98), discussed further along.
Linke’s employment relation with Stolper blossomed into a love affair,
condoned by his wife Toni (neé Kassowitz), also a main contributor to the journal.
33
Social democrat and economic theorist Carl Landauer and psychologist Georg Katona were permanent
editors. Contributors included, economists Lujo Brentano, Theodor Heuss and Wilhelm Röpke, Fritz
Naphtali, sociologist and economist Alexander Rüstow, Hungarian political economist and historian
Karl Polanyi, Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, physician August von Hayek, Prussian Prime
Minister Otto Braun, social democratic union leaders Fritz Baade and Ernst Tarnow, politician Hans
Luther, philosopher and cabinet adviser Kurt Riezler, politicians and key figures in the women’s
movement Gertrud Bäumer and Marie-Elisabeth Lüders.
69
Prejudice might presume a man twenty years Linke’s elder exploited the enthusiastic
and attractive woman, perhaps like the businessman depicted in The Crime of Monsieur
Lange (1936) by French filmmaker Jean Renoir. A time of both opportunity and
exploitation as men of Linke’s generation had been killed at war, across the twenties
young women took positions as typists and secretaries in new business firms and public
bureaus (Führich 2000; Kracauer 1998). After Linke’s work at the DDP Youth League
that inevitably led to her encounter with Stolper, habit of thought might view this
working-class woman from the east of Berlin, ‘fortunate’ to be associated with the elite
DDP circle. Now connected to journalists, economists and politicians she could
‘progress’ as a ‘career’ journalist. Rightly so, Wenhold confirmed: ‘A host of friends
and personal contacts helped Lilo to put down roots into this wide area’ (2011: 98). This
is part of the story and the least interesting. Linke’s credentials needn’t be justified in
her proximity to the ‘success’ and ‘expertise’ of Gustav Stolper or his circle—asymetric
power relations of generational, class, gender difference and Cartesian binaries of
rich/poor, educated/uneducated, male/female—incidentally, an old way of seeing,
articulated further along in the chapter.
Stolper was not always privileged. He too, had lived despair and used
knowledge and the search for truth as a way out of darkness toward hope. Toni’s
biography of Gustav explained that his grandparents were Wanderdruckes34 and had
emigrated from Zhuravno in Lviv Oblast (Ukraine) to settle in Vienna, assimilating to
Austrian culture (1979: 19). Gustav (1888) was the middle of three children, Martha
(1885) and Ida (1897). In the stock market crash of 1895-96, Gustav’s father lost
everything. His self-respect was tarnished from which his marriage and family never
fully recovered (p. 21). At the age of eight Gustav quickly learned ‘other-regarding’ as
he took responsibility for his family’s needs. No stranger to suffering, Gustav saw his
sister Ida given to a children’s care home as the family could not make ends meet.
Martha was married off to a wealthy man and later the couple became victims of Hitler.
His mother’s nephew, a well-educated bank clerk and Social Democrat warm to
Marxism, became an elder brother for Gustav (p. 23). Educated at a Sophiengymnasium
in central Vienna in Latin and Greek, German history, language and literature (p. 25),
fellow student Theodore Dürnbauer recalled: ‘He was not an ambitious career oriented
student, who wants to be the first in his class at any price, but this innate quality in him
meant that he undertook everything thoroughly. […] He had an outstanding pedagogical
talent’ (p. 27).
34
Wanderdruckes refers to forced migration and to seek social elevation.
70
At eighteen Gustav envisioned becoming an economic journalist (p. 30), a
profession not yet a discipline at university.35 His career formed a synthesis of literature,
philosophy and moral social duty. Gustav was attracted to economy, literature and
‘[l]ove of the facts’ (p. 30) as a form of philosophical wisdom between human
constraint in social circumstances, on the one hand, and the freedom to enjoy with
fellow common man, that all flourish, on the other. Drawn to education, he believed a
teacher’s value rests in the ability ‘to intervene with his word, where circumstances are
beyond conventional understanding, where misunderstandings threaten to distort things;
the moral obligation vis-à-vis the humans suffering, whom the free man ought to serve’
(p. 30). Gustav and Toni were avid readers of politics, economy, history and sociology.
Toni was born into a bourgeois family although she claimed them not typically
bourgeois (Stolper 1989: 13). She described herself a Gebildet meaning ‘educated’ in
German.36 At university Toni joined a club of socialist students (p. 23). In their early
courtship, Gustav and Toni sat in lecturers given by Georg Simmel on the philosophy of
money (p. 53). They were friends with individuals across many political spectrums of
the Left, including Rudolph Hilferding (p. 98). Gustav appreciated the works of
Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but in particular Goethe.
As a science for life, Goethe’s method requires observation and participation to
gather more reliable phenomena or facts for ‘true’ knowledge. ‘There is a delicate
[tender] empiricism which makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby
becoming true theory’ (1995: 307). He best defines this reciprocal process as follows:
When people of lively intellect first respond to Nature’s challenge to be understood, they feel
irresistibly tempted to impose their will upon the natural objects they are studying. Before long,
however, these natural objects close in upon us with such force as to make us realize that we in
turn must now acknowledge their might and hold in respect the authority they exert over us.
Hardly are we convinced of this reciprocal influence when we become aware of the twofold
infinitude: in the natural objects, of the diversity of life and growth and of vitally interlocking
relationships; in ourselves, of the possibility of endless development through always keeping our
minds receptive and disciplining our minds in new forms of assimilation and procedure (Goethe
cited in Bywater p. 298).
Henri Bortoft referred to Craig Holdrege’s description ‘to think like a plant lives’ (2012:
62). When Nature is observed it too challenges the observer back with the need to be
understood. One must not ‘see’ past Nature. I extend Goethe’s use of ‘nature’ to include
nations and cultures. Daniel Wahl (2005: 70) calls Goethe’s scientific method
35
Ignaz Jastrow was one of the founders of the Handelshochschule (1906) at the University of Berlin—
the first academic education for business. Two years later Frank W. Taussig, a friend of Jastrow’s
founded the Harvard Business School (1908). (Redlich 1957: 62).
36
‘The term ‘gebildet’ in Germany means they have read widely and their minds are cultured and so on.
But we were also in touch with the people of Vienna in their characteristic ways’ (p. 13).
71
‘conscious-process-participation epistemology’ arguing it exactly opposite to ‘subjectobject-separation epistemology’ of Cartesian mechanistic metaphors and dualistic
rationalism of Newtonian materialism. In Goethan science, the observer is the
participant and lives in the world with ‘direct experience, empathy, intuition and
imagination’ (p. 60) to cultivate a new way of seeing. Whether Linke or Stolper were
familiar with Goethe’s scientific method of study is uncertain, yet their praxis appears
to mirror the characteristics of ‘lively intellects’ practicing ‘tender empiricism’.
For Goethe, lively intellects practice an infinite two-fold process. First, they
welcome diverse voices and explore the vitality amongst them. Second, they allow these
voices to influence them with new ideas that gradually facilitate their metamorphosis or
evolution. Lively intellects see the world in an entirely different way by using three
capacities as a method of tender empiricism. They combine Anschauen (seeing) and
Anschauungen (intuitions) to form a synthesis Vernunft (rationality). Anschauungen
(intuitive perception) allows one to see how a part Gestalt (structured form) comprises
the whole Bildung (formation) and vice versa. In the case of Linke, this implies
recognizing her own culture but also that of another simultaneously. Bortoft uses the
simple line drawing of a duck-rabbit as a metaphor for Goethe’s way of seeing (p. 23).
When viewed from different angles the drawing represents a duck and rabbit, yet is one
figure or ‘multi-perspectival figure’ (p. 75). Ron Brady referred to the process as
‘becoming other in order to remain itself’ (p. 76). Transferring this idea to Linke’s
lifeway or Weltanschauung (rejecting party politics of both the Left and Right)—selfpreservation—she not only learned but also became the other in order to return to the
self, incidentally, an act completely opposite to that of Nazism, where German culture
was the only culture deemed superior. Importantly, Goethe’s Gestalten (structured
forms) are never fixed or at rest. ‘[E]verything is in a flux or eternal motion’ (1995: 63).
Linke’s ‘perceptive imagination’ Anschauen—a new way of seeing—imbricated
experiences and narratives across geographies, written in what might be categorized as
the Bildungsroman genre. Drawing from Franco Moretti, stories of one’s formation and
cultivation in the German Bildungsroman constitute a form of pedagogy (1987: 29). For
Moretti, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is the birth of the Bildungsroman (p. 3). Wilhelm
Meister is non-capitalistic. Goethe’s characters promote social cohesion over idleness.
In Moretti’s words:
work in the Bildungsroman creates a continuity between external and internal, between the ‘best
and most intimate’ part of the soul and the ‘public’ aspect of existence. Once again we have the
congruence of formation and socialization, but there is more. For a work defined in this way is in
72
fact indistinguishable from what a large part of the German culture of the time called ‘art’ (p.
30).
According to this reading, in the German tradition, work is not about having but being.
Moretti sees a cultural difference between a protagonist experiencing his/her formation
and maturation in the German tradition (p. 56) from the ‘insipid hero’ (p. 11) of the
English tradition. Mired with heroic, happy endings, the English tradition discredits the
genre. The German genre doesn’t produce commodities but rather objects that are
harmonious with the whole as a form of ‘reappropriation’ with the one who created
them (p. 29). For Moretti, ‘Goethe’s choice is not motivated by the desire for
melodramatic ‘effect’: it is rather a superb combination of rhetorical and cultural
strategies’ (p. 70). With this German-British cultural difference on Bildungsroman
exposed, in what follows, I approach Linke’s encounters with Stolper and later with
Jameson, as would a tender empiricist, to interpret their reciprocal collaboration as
‘lively intellects’ involved in a kind of Bildungsroman of self-development.
Encrypting his name as ‘Dr. Berger’ Linke remarked of Stolper, ‘my chief, was
in every regard an outstanding personality’ (RD 385). Stolper also wrote highly of
Linke, dedicating a seven-page letter: ‘For L. the American friend searching and
fighting for truth’ in This Age of Fable (1942). Using ‘L’ to address her, as Linke was
now in Latin America, such precautions were wise as suspicion against Germans as
possible Nazi-sympathizers was common. His sincere passage typified Linke’s honest
aims and curiosity to know.
You are bewildered. You are not an historian or an economist or a sociologist, but simply an
honest person who takes life seriously and wants to understand the political and economic world
we live in. The fears and hopes, the worries and wishes, the perils and plans of which we are the
involuntary objects never leave you alone. You think and talk of them day and night, they are
with you wherever you turn. It is a frightening world, and the public debate makes it even more
frightful because the appeal to fear has become a customary argument where knowledge is
wanting. [...] You are not aware how easily you become prey to propaganda because certain
slogans, by virtue of endless repetition, are eventually taken for granted (p. xiii).
While an indication of how he perceived Linke ‘an honest person who takes life
seriously’ Stolper also succinctly captured the essence of how German common man
was coerced into, in 1942, WWII. While Stolper wrote the letter to ‘L’ it might well be
seen as generic counsel for the reader. His wisdom was of a tempered man and his
passage rings strikingly familiar with the current ‘war on terror’ to the same end. On a
visit to Berlin in 1932, Jameson observed Stolper was ‘a fine intelligent head’ and ‘a
man who knows he is better informed than anyone he is likely to meet’ (JN1 274).
The Volkswirt gave Linke an extraordinary chance to learn. Habitual thought
73
might equate her position simply as an apprentice—not an incorrect assumption—yet
profound ‘experiential learning’ coincided with one of the most intense political periods
of Weimar; 1929 to 1933. Linke was direct witness to and active participant in the
hegemonic and counter-hegemonic struggle between rivaling politcal parties in
Weimar’s multi-party democracy to conquer economy, law and state—the three pillars
of bourgeois democracy—whose ‘winner’ sealed the nations’ fate. Freire’s (1970/1996)
notion of ‘situationality’ is central to their experiences as a ‘vitally interlocking
relationship’ with a common cause to save Germany. ‘Human beings are because they
are in a situation. And they will be more the more they not only critically reflect upon
their existence but critically act upon it’(p. 90). Dewey also dwelt on the notion of
‘situation’. Dewey’s second principle, ‘interaction’, for interpreting educational force
and function, ‘assigns equal rights to both factors in experience—objective and internal
conditions. Taken together, or in their interaction, they form what we call a situation’
(1938: 42). Situation and interaction are inseparable. Dewey criticized traditional
education for emphasis on external over internal factors that guide experiences.
Obviously, the Volkswirt was not divorced from life but actively engaged in
influencing public opinion to divert Weimar from further political polarization.
Hansjorg Klausinger (2001: 249) points out that after the capital flight of 1929,
reparation payments became the main focus of the Volkswirt and its contributors
debated alternative solutions to the German Depression. Stolper was adamantly against
credit expansion, believing Germany suffered a lack of confidence (p. 254) and was ‘a
prisoner of her own inflation experiences’ (p. 256). Stolper used the Volkswirt as a
platform to build support for his economic plan. On 5 October 1929, he revealed his
Mannheim Plan for Germany at the DDP Parteitag. Robert Pois emphasizes, Stolper’s
program stressed state involvement in the economy as crucial; called for less tax on the
poor and middle-classes and profit-sharing schemes with the proletariat. He blamed the
lack of capital distribution on monopolies. For Pois, Stolper was a man ahead of his
time, in that, his economic program resembled that of a ‘semi-welfare state’—a political
plan in the Western World implemented only after WWII. He goes on to claim Stolper’s
effort to ‘build bridges’ between the bourgeoisie and proletariat was of ‘immense
significance’ (1976: 68-69). Hence, Stolper used facts to help common man ‘flourish’
as his DDP political point of view wanted to foster a middle ground for the betterment
of Germany as a whole. Misunderstood and attacked from both sides, his economic plan
was never brought to fruition.
The Volkswirt taught Linke new habits, like seriousness and responsibility to
74
work for ‘truth’ over the lies of rising NSDAP propaganda. Reading daily the political
and economic sections of international newspapers in three languages, after a short
period working alongside Toni, Linke wrote the Chronik aus der Woche (The Weekly
Chronicle) section of the journal (Wenhold 2011: 99). She learned to debate and discuss
diverse topics and typed Gustav’s DDP speeches. Rather than an employer-employee
relation, Stolper took it upon himself to educate Linke. She appreciated his pedagogical
generosity, patience and empathy. Linke was fortunate, in my view, for this alternative
chance to learn—similar to her experience with Anne—devoid of fear, intimidation or
stultification. In her words:
Important for me was that he was generous enough to become my teacher instead of being
annoyed by my lack of knowledge, and that he possessed the genial ability to explain a
complicated economic process in its essential outline in such a way that I could understand what
I was writing down for him (RD 385).
A considerable chance to overcome inferiority and recover her ‘lost humanity’, Linke
earned a new set of eyes, learning the discipline of economy and its omnipresence on
everyday life. Stolper fondly remarked on her development in October 1930,
‘Telephone with Lilo, her voice is clear and strong. It is [...] happy, very active’
(Wenhold 2011: 101). Stolper was reassured of his efforts. Difficult to envision why
this mundane excerpt has importance, the economic context in which Stolper stated it is
crucial. Workers on relief went from 2,258,000 on 15 March 1930 to 6,031,000 by
March-end 1932 (Stolper 1940: 197). Germany was paralyzed with fear. According to
Jameson, ‘Berlin at that time was conscientiously corrupt and gross, with misery, grey
hunger, uncertainty, in the background’ it was ‘boiling like a crater’ (JN1 267).
In autumn 1931, Linke briefly returned to institutional education, narrating the
experience in her first autobiography Tale Without End (1934). Attempts were made to
re-educate the masses for future work, a highly problematic endeavor according to
Borinski. Adult education programs had to allow for diverse neurosis, constituting the
pathology of idleness. The long-term unemployed no longer believed they would ever
work again. He pointed out: ‘The irrational fate aroused an irrational state of mind; and
the whole society, not only its “unemployed sector”, was overcome by the emotions and
fears of a period of mass catastrophe’ (p. 166). Stolper helped her obtain a scholarship
to an adult education program; Akademie der Arbeit (Academy of Labour)—a joint
program with Frankfurt University—offering classes in economics, politics, sociology,
social policy and law, for workers (Wenhold 2011: 100). Sixty experienced laborers;
boys and men from across Germany between the ages of eighteen and forty-five,
attended the nine-month program. Frankfurt University was known as the ‘citizens’
75
University, a Bürger-Universität and the Akademie for its association with the trade
union movement and 1918 Revolution (Borinski p. 92). As with the adult education
experiment mentioned earlier, teachers encouraged student participation and discussion
similar to the Volkshochschulbewegung (p. 96). The curriculum focused on ‘Labour’
and ‘Society’ teaching ‘realistic education for life’ (p. 96). This alternative adult
education was in striking contrast to what Jameson, as an outsider, observed in 1932.
‘University professors and secondary schoolmasters were permitted openly to teach
disrespect for the existing constitution and to foster a Nationalism of the most violent
and anti-democratic colour’ (TWE xxiii). Universities had now become a Wartehalle für
Unbeschäftigte—waiting rooms for the workless. ‘The lecture-rooms are so crowded
that students pin to the floor scraps of paper with their names, to reserve a few inches of
standing room’ (JNI 270).
Borinski viewed the Akademie a ‘stimulating attempt at combining academic
work and workers’ education, at finding a new way of providing a College education
with a genuine political impetus and a social-educational spirit’ and was ‘watched
inside and outside Germany’ (p. 97). The task was to ‘shape anew the order of European
life’ as Borinski asserted: ‘Realistic fact-finding in the spheres of economics, state, law,
society, psychology, etc. is determined, ultimately, by the question “What ought to be”’
(p. 95 fn 108)? Linke approached her chance to learn with earnestness. The only female
student, ‘I worked hard to keep pace. Gave lectures, wrote essays, debated, asked’
(TWE 4). While critics on the Left blamed the Akademie for not educating ‘improved
fighters’ for the Labour Movement but rather ‘semi-intellectuals and snobs’ (Borinski p.
96) Linke’s account, based on lived experiences, differs. She and fellow comrades seem
to have graduated as fighters when she admitted: ‘We all wanted to learn as much as
possible. Most of us were keen Socialists, determined to understand’ (TWE 4). On 1
May 1932 fellow Akademie comrades marched together. ‘Socialism is still alive’. After
1933 Linke conceded: ‘There was never another first of May for us’ (TWE 11). In my
view, instrumental to this experience, was the principle: ‘What ought to be’. It likely
encouraged Linke to continue learning and gathering facts pertinent for a ‘realistic
education’ and praxis of ‘tender empiricism’.
In June 1933, the Volkswirt was forcibly sold to SS entrepreneurs in what Toni
recalled ‘a careful legal disguise’ (Wenhold 2011: 102). Essentially, the journal had
crossed the path of the NSDAP (Klausinger p. 258). When Hitler entered the Reichstag
he eliminated all opposing economic opinion. Carl Landauer was arrested and Stolper
was concerned, not only for his colleague, but also for his own life (Wenhold 2011:
76
102). The Stolper family left for the United States. Gustav, according to Klausinger
might be viewed ‘a kind of tragic hero’ (p. 263) resolute on liberal democracy. Gustav’s
son Wolfgang acknowledged his father’s efforts an ‘[a]ct of a deeply moral man who
does the right thing even when it seems hopeless’ (Wenhold 2011: 97). Linke went to
England. Lilo and Gustav reunited in Mexico in 1946 following WWII. Although
parted, their relationship continued until Stolper died of a stroke on 27 December 1947
at age fifty-nine. Three days prior to his death he wrote Lilo: ‘In 1948 I have to go
through my 60th Birthday—which means I have to start thinking on the liquidation of
my life. How I’ll do it God only knows. It is too absurd’ (p. 108). Lilo remained,
continuing their work, in the universal language of English. In a letter to Toni, Linke
wrote from South America about Gustav with great fondness: ‘I would have needed his
help very much... I want to make something good out of my life... so that as part of my
life Gustl will live on’ (p. 108).
As a pioneer of knowledge and ‘outstanding pedagogical talent’ largely selftaught, in the spirit of his grandparents, Gustav was a wayfarer, willing to share with
those who possessed an honest determination to learn. Thus, I suggest, deep-rooted
experiences of inferiority and injustice early in life, directed Gustav’s praxis as those of
a higher ideal to emancipate another. But this is a tricky project, for as Rancière
believes ‘...to emancipate someone else, one must be emancipated oneself. One must
know oneself to be a voyager of the mind, similar to all other voyagers’ (p. 33). Toni
recalled Lilo’s relationship with Gustav, ‘…the chance of her life which she took up
with courage, prudently supported by her mentor’ (Wenhold 2011: 99). In my view, the
political and economic crisis brought a shared responsibility to emancipate Germany
from ruin, making Lilo and Gustav equal in the struggle. Their actions evoke Rancière’s
assertion, ‘...emancipation is the consciousness of that equality, of that reciprocity that
alone permits intelligence to be realized by verification’ (p. 39). Rather than Stolper’s
‘success’ I suggest common obstacles, failures and disappointments experienced by
Stolper and Linke helped cultivate their common aim to do ‘good’ for common man in
their ‘vitally interlocking relationship’. In my view, Gustav’s willingness to educate
Lilo is a voluntary radical act.
Encountering Margaret
In 1931 Linke journeyed across England for three months staying in the homes
of miners, factory-workers, shopkeepers, commercial travelers, trade-union secretaries
and farmers (RD 400). She had come to see what her ‘English comrades’ were thinking
77
and doing (TWE xii). Jameson first met her at a Labour conference in Scarborough. In
her autobiography, Journey From the North (1969/1984), Jameson wrote: ‘Turning, I
saw what I took to be a schoolgirl in a shabby coat and a soft hat pulled down over her
eyes’ (JN1 270-71). What she ‘took’ for a ‘schoolgirl’ was a person whose experiences
had made Linke far older than her age. When she asked Linke, ‘[w]hat do you want
most?’ Jameson expected her to respond: ‘To have the money to travel. Or: To be heard
of.’ Linke simply stated: ‘To live, to work, to build a world where is freedom and bread
for all’ (JN1 272). Jameson was taken aback. ‘Where had this East Berlin child […]
learned to defend herself and her opinions in any company, politely, but with
unshakable self-will’ (JN1 275)? This started their life-long friendship.
In early 1933, with Hitler now in the seat of power, Linke wrote to Jameson,
‘...one must either commit suicide or try to handle the situation [...] we feel old and tired
and do not have the comfort that those coming after us will carry on our work and ideas’
(JN1 308). Jobless and homeless, she arrived on Jameson’s doorstep in June looking
merely for a ‘chance to live’ (JN1 309). Having escaped German fascism, as Oswald
Mosley had established the British Union of Fascists the previous October, the mood in
Britain was similar. Maslen (2014) points out:
The British Union of Fascists was still flourishing; and when, in the same year, one of the first
Gallup polls asked those interviewed whether they preferred Fascism or Communism, 70 percent
of those under thirty chose Fascism, and a disturbingly high proportion of the upper classes,
while not actively supporting Oswald Mosley, leaned toward Fascism because they feared
Communism (p. 149-50).
In 1930s Britain, German and Austrian refugees numbered over seventy thousand (p.
244). Unwelcome in Britain (Wenhold 2012: 26)37 they suffered ‘dehumanization’ at
the hands of British authorities and were interned as enemy aliens and jailed in camps
(Maslen p. 244). In 1938, Churchill took a move to arrest anyone and everyone
considered a possible threat, declaring, ‘collar the lot’ (Gillman 1980: 153). Even those
associated with PEN were not immune (Maslen p. 245-46). Additionally, Hitler’s
Brown Network pursued German pacifists and political figures abroad.38 Two women
living nearby Linke, Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm, possibly became Network
victims. Their case still remains unsolved (Wenhold 2012: 33). Britain was a dangerous
place. Perhaps, Linke’s proximity to Jameson’s political, academic and literary circles
37
The Aliens Restriction Act (1919) and The Aliens Order (1920) restricted work for aliens (refugees).
Aliens were kept a close eye on and if found undesirable were swiftly deported. Any capital brought to
the UK was to be redirected to “depressed” areas of England to bring employment to British subjects.
38
Theodor Lessing was murdered, Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt was under surveillance and there was a
planned assassination of Karl-Heinz Spalts (Wenhold 2012: 30).
78
largely on the Left, might have dissuaded Hitler’s Brown Network from pursuing her.
As with Stolper, habit of thought might assume Jameson a savvy bourgeois
blessed with the full privileges of her class. Such is true. Yet rather than a self-centric
lifestyle of privilege Jameson subordinated herself to others, that they become
productive, creative human beings. She campaigned for social justice of the poor and
saved refugees from prison and death. Born in the conservative town of Whitby—
northern shipbuilding port in decline—her father William Storm Jameson of Norwegian
ancestry (Maslen p. 11), worked on merchant ships from the age of thirteen. Marrying
his half-sister Hannah Margaret, the couple had four children; Margaret (1891);
Winifred (1895), Harold (1896) and Dorothy (1906). Jameson was no stranger to
suffering. Raised in a dysfunctional marriage, her father’s abuse toward her mother saw
violence breed violence. Margaret received the brunt of her mother’s anger (p. 12). A
lonely child she recalled: ‘There are no sharper mental torments in life than those
endured by the child marked out to be ridiculed [...] and convinced of inferiority’ (JN1
43). Inferiority was compounded with the north-south divide in Britain. In her lifetime,
Margaret lost Harold, killed in action in 1917 (Maslen p. 34) and Dorothy in an air raid
on her Reading home in 1943 (p. 295).
‘[D]etermined to get myself to a university’ (JN1 42) preparing for
matriculation exams at a school in Scarborough, Margaret fraternized with students
Sydney and Oswald Harland—‘red-hot socialists’ (Maslen p. 16). Winning one of three
available state scholarships in Yorkshire, Jameson studied English at Leeds University
(p. 15). Pressured by her mother, she married a fellow Leeds student and gave birth to
her son Bill in 1915. With a strong dislike for domesticity, she used education as a
means to freedom and pursued a MA in Modern European Drama at Kings College.
Reluctantly working as an advertising copywriter in London for a brief period, she
published The Pot Boils (1919), her first of sixty-five books. Writing for the socialist
weekly New Commonwealth (JNI 153-54) she was infuriated by dismissive language in
the British press over German and Austrian children dying of hunger. ‘For the first time
in my life I had the sense, horribly familiar later, of a dark wave of pain, cruelty, fear,
gathering force at the other side of Europe and about to rush down’ (JN1 156).
Jameson found her own way to ‘walk through the fire’, an expression I borrow
from twentieth century American poet Charles Bukowski (1999), without relinquishing
her principles. Siding with the Left yet skeptical of them, she feared in trying to change
a bad situation they only made it worse (Maslen p. 31). Although supporting organized
labor Jameson openly criticized union leaders. Through involvement with English PEN
79
in 1922, she found common ground with pacifist Hermon Ould, jailed in 1917 as a
contentious objector. Ould admitted, ‘it was not easy… to find people ready to accept
the proposition that Germans, too, were human’ (p. 56-57). American publisher Alfred
Knopf hired Jameson as a literary agent for his London office to scout new writing
talent. But ‘making money would never be Margaret’s prime motive’ (p. 157).
Divorcing her first husband, she married Guy Chapman—an intellectual equal—who
suffered trauma after being gassed in WWI, to which he emotionally never fully
recovered (p. 66). Financially supporting Guy and her son Bill, she was ‘permanently
short of cash’ (p. 101) and had to compromise by writing for mainstream publications.
In a 1933 letter to Vera Brittain Jameson joked: ‘My life, between German refugee
[Lilo], Guy and Bill, is a cross between a boarding house keeper and a receptionist… I
cook breakfast for four, make beds for three, run about showing my refugee to people I
hope will help her, and in the intervals write my novel. I think I am an ass’ (p. 126).
Jennifer Birkett (2009) wrote of Jameson’s fondness for Linke:
Lilo Linke, poor, beautiful, and a fiery socialist, brought with her from East Berlin a contempt
for old men and an enthusiasm for change that reminded Jameson of her own iconoclastic youth.
They immediately became close friends. Lilo for Jameson was the ‘Younger Brother’ of
fairytale, brimming with life and enthusiasm, always successful, and always loved (p. 105).
Steadfast in support of Linke, ‘I began to harry her to write down this French adventure,
as a start’. Linke had journeyed across France in 1932 for six months. After several
weeks she produced the manuscript Tale Without End, ‘written in what she imagined
was English’ (JN1 310). Jameson made revisions hoping she would learn. ‘She would
attend for a few sentences; then, seized by a fit of yawns, get up and go away, saying,
“Do it as you like, dear Margaret”’ (JN1 311). Linke learned her own way. ‘In a few
months, merely by listening, talking, reading (a little), she wrote clear lively English, as
later in South America she learned to write Spanish’ (JN1 311). To warm English
readers to Lilo’s first autobiography, Jameson penned a generous introduction.
Imparting similarities in ‘our mood of 1913’ to ‘create a new world’ (TWE xiv)—a
spirit still alive in 1932 Germany—Jameson illustrated the obstacles German social
democrats faced. ‘My sharpest insight into the responsibility of my own and other
countries’ was ‘for the growth of the Nazi teaching...’ when Germany signed the Treaty
of Versailles (TWE xxi). She added, Lilo’s story ‘is worth listening to, for the
unselfconscious directness and honesty of the narrator’ (TWE xxxvii). Margaret sent
Lilo—manuscript in hand—to a close friend, Michael Sadleir at Constable & Co. press,
who as a generous publisher welcomed the work (Maslen p. 125).
80
Seldom idle, Linke took up every chance to educate Anglo-American ‘native
bias’ (habituation) out of its habitual mindset of indifference. Wenhold states an
‘important aspect is the effort to enlighten the Anglo-American reader as to the cause of
the Weimar Republic’s failure and the threat Hitler poses to all of Europe. In the face of
appeasement as the prevailing public opinion in England, Lilo Linke believed
enlightenment to be a painful necessity’ (2011: 104). Jameson agreed. ‘Better education
was vital’ to attain ‘a fully educated and classless society’ (Maslen p. 137). In
December 1933, Linke persuaded reluctant Labour politicians Arthur Henderson,
William Gillies and Aneurin Bevan to rally for the release of SDP politicians, Ernst
Heilmann and Friedrich Ebert’s son, Fritz Ebert, imprisoned in German camps.39 She
was active in the campaign to save Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist and winner of
the 1935 Nobel Peace prize for exposing Hitler’s rearmament of Germany. Linke and
playwright Ernst Toller looked after Ossietzky’s daughter Rosalinda in Darlington
(Wenhold 2012: 16). During an interview Holl noted, ‘[e]ven as an old woman, in 1991,
Rosalinda von Ossietzky-Palm mentions the special place that Lilo Linke had taken in
her life, and that she had never forgotten her. She said she had been so totally different
from other young German women’ (1987: 64). Linke translated into English the story of
Wolfgang Langhoff, a socialist theatre director imprisoned in a prototype WWII camp
in 1933, titled Rubber Truncheon: Being an Account of Thirteen Months Spent in a
Concentration Camp (1935). She journeyed across Turkey in 1935, published an article
Social Changes in Turkey (1937) and was invited to give a talk at the London Royal
Institute of Foreign Affairs (1937). ‘I trembled for her, but she spoke with the greatest
simplicity and coolness to an audience which listened with respect’, recalled Jameson
(JN1 311). Linke frequently spoke on the BBC radio program Newsmap and gave a talk
on Turkey (Wenhold 2011: 107)41 and contributed a chapter on Turkey for the
anthology Hitler’s Route to Baghdad (1939).
‘Margaret was increasingly aware of the European situation, and her friendship
with people like young Lilo Linke brought her firsthand news of growing violence
against the Jews and those on the left; for active Social Democrats like Lilo were now
being treated as no different from Communists’, wrote Maslen (p. 102). However, to
my mind, Maslen has overlooked how Linke transformed her encounter with Jameson
into a ‘vitally interlocking relationship’. Rather than ‘brought’ news, Linke made
39
Harrison Brown to Arthur Henderson, 2 October 1933, IO/GER/3/59, National Museum of Labour
History (Manchester, UK)
41
Frank Horrabin hosted the program inviting figures like Karl Polanyi and A. J. Toynbee to discuss
political, economic and cultural issues. Linke spoke on the Turkish Republic on 6 December 1938.
81
Jameson experience their situation firsthand. On a 1932 visit to Berlin, Lilo arranged a
programme, ‘all part of my education’, Jameson recalled (JN1 277). Lilo took her to a
ten thousand strong communist workers rally in support of Socialist candidate Ernst
Thälmann at Sportpalast, where women recited poetry of jailed husbands and children
held banners as police broke up the crowd. She had Margaret debate with Communist
friends and DDP Youth League members and experience gross class inequality. In 1937
the two women stayed in Paris over the summer. Linke introduced her to a diverse
group of friends to help Margaret see how fear tore at the heart of Europe more than it
did in Britain. ‘I had with my own eyes seen “the other France”’ (JN1 363). Her
fortunate encounter with Lilo fortified Margaret’s sense of responsibility. Evident in a
1938 letter, Jameson confided to journalist and friend Harrison Brown:
But the Home Office won’t give them their visas, nor refuse them either. I lie awake at night
wondering who else I can get at to do something. It is awful. And of course they are only a drop
in the ocean of threatened people, Jews, socialists, social democrats, communists (Maslen p.
205).
Linke’s Cancel All Vows (1938) was a first attempt at a novel handling the
subject of exile. Hope is a central theme, indicative of the responsibility Linke felt to
elicit hope in dark times. Exploring the post-WWI male psyche of an injured German
veteran—Julius Bergmann exiled in France—she captured the plight of ordinary
refugees and thousands of youth, whose education and future were forfeit to war. Holl
sees protagonist Marthe Jansen ‘unmistakably a self-portrait of Lilo Linke’ (1987: 74). I
agree with his assertion. ‘Her way through exile is covered as part of the narrative in
Cancel All Vows, not as an inescapable fate to be suffered passively, but as an [integral]
part of a life plan to be shaped through her own responsibility’ (p. 75).
Inevitably Jameson’s philosophy influenced Linke, providing another noninstitutional chance to learn—free of intimidation and stultification—in order to recover
her ‘lost humanity’. At a lecture in Leeds titled The Novel in Contemporary Life
Jameson stated, ‘novelists had a responsibility to engage with such problems of their
society as poverty, political extremism, and the ever-present debates about war and
peace’ (Maslen p. 114). They should be a ‘receiving station’ for the voices of society
and ‘sensitive enough to detect the past and the future existing in the present’ (p. 181).
She thought it necessary to collect facts about the human condition. ‘We need
documents, not, as the Naturalists needed them […] but as charts, as timber for the fire
some writer will light to-morrow morning’ (p. 174). In Jameson’s view: ‘People should
learn to consider the interests of others even to the extent of preferring them and thus
counteract selfishness and self-interest’ (Golubov 2007: 100). For Jameson, changing
82
society began with an active role in the growth of the community (Golubov 2002: 9). As
Jameson put it, the writer must ‘go and live for a long time at one of the points of
departure of the new society’ (McLoughlin 2007: 110).
Nattie Golubov (2002) argues interwar period women writers Jameson, Holtby,
West and Mitchison focused on the ‘average individual as a social rather than simply a
psychological individual’ to challenge post-WWI British readers’ selfish, consumerist
lifestyles (p. 6). Characters in Jameson’s novels underwent ‘a gradual transformation of
personality’ (p. 9). In some ways Storm Jameson’s authorship might relate to the genre
of Bildungsroman, which would challenge Moretti’s earlier assumptions about English
literature. They gave supreme ‘worth’ to the individual. As a relational self, the
individual has the ability to shape their future. Autonomous and self-conscious agents
can transform their social conditions by being both separate and connected to others (p.
38). Golubov concluded these writers’ praxis wasn’t fully solved in their novels, as
theory didn’t completely reflect practice (p. 10). To debate Golubov’s conclusion is
beyond the scope of my research. What interests me, however, is Jameson’s notion of
‘shared humanity’—a belief in human commonality acknowledged when ‘prejudices are
eroded by experience’ (Maslen p. 295). Jameson argued if Europe were to survive, it
would have to change its attitude toward other civilizations (p. 308). Returning to
Dewey’s notion of ‘subject-matter’ in experience at the outset of this chapter, Jameson’s
un-habitual thought is vital as it implies living in a ‘new society’—Linke’s Turkish
journey—might help transcend prejudice, what Linke intuited of English-speaking
readers toward the people of Turkey and the rest of the world. Her radical act to
emancipate readers to see anew and disrupt habitual thought, using autobiography as a
form of pedagogy, is explored in the Turkish case study.
Certainly Jameson’s epistemology was manifest in her worldview and
engagement with Europeans as an autonomous agent regardless of institutional
limitations by PEN, the British government and capitalism. The first to admit her
‘bourgeois weakness’ of ‘trying to lead a comfortable life’, Jameson oscillated between
the organic community of Whitby and an estranged life of industrial capitalism
(Golubov 2002: 66). I suggest it was Linke who actively practiced Jameson’s
epistemology. Lilo journeyed extensively in other cultures. Lilo would ‘go and live for a
long time’ in a ‘new society’, like Turkey. Lilo was a proper autonomous agent, as she
did not commit herself to the interests of only one nation but of common man across
nations and cultures. Lilo underwent a ‘gradual transformation of personality’—a
Veblenian evolution or Goethean metamorphosis. Lilo’s praxis hoped to ‘transform the
83
world’ (Freire 1970/1996: 27).
In my view, Linke’s praxis was a combination of Goethe’s Bildungsroman and
Veblen’s ‘instinct of workmanship’ (purposeful work). Rather than idle wandering,
each experience was a ‘fortunate encounter’ that enriched her evolution. ‘From a selfcentered person I had to become a pedagogue, a model, and a leader, and yet a friend’
(RD 168). A ‘tender empiricist’ she was receptive to diverse voices. ‘I always tried to be
on good terms with everyone’ (RD 287). Life-long friendships with Stolper and
Jameson were proof Linke didn’t limit herself to one class but also never relinquished
support for the proletariat, although she was not one of them, having classed herself
‘petit bourgeois’ she certainly had empathy for them. Growing up in a working class
neighborhood in the east of Berlin had shaped her political subjectivity. ‘I could not
hate the workers’ (RD 81). Her stories about the ‘dehumanization’ of common man at
the hands of capitalist oppression also told of struggles to retain their dignity when
faced with the onslaught of business civilization which for Veblen ‘deranges the
ordinary conditions of life for the common man’ (1919/1964: 117). Organizing young employees into trade unions, Linke’s empathetic narrative
captured the resentment of common man primped and modeled to a ‘business shape’
and ‘never being themselves’.
There was Marie selling shoes; Quicks apprentice—no, errand-boy in the bookkeeping
department of the German Cable Works; the twins, Elisabeth and Gerda, pretty girls, the nicest
singers in the group, both shorthand-typists in large firms; Werner, a clerk in a pneumatic-tire
factory; Erwin, the rather wild-looking black-haired flute-player, who had just given up his
secretarial job at the Central Abattoir because he was so sick of it and was now looking for
something else that would suit him better; Klärchen, friendly, always smiling, but shy,
apprentice in a firm for ladies’ underwear; Herbert, working in the propaganda department of a
bootblacking factory and hoping to become a commercial traveller for the same firm; Clover, a
salesman in a cheap tailor’s. And so on, the long list of all our members, sweating from morning
till night in huge or odd rooms, pushed about and pushing, modelled into a suitable business
shape and never being themselves—could they really put enthusiasm into their work and draw
satisfaction out of it? Even I, who had entered my self-chosen job with so many aspirations, had
long discovered that I had gone into a blind alley (RD 181).
Linke need not have described each person. Sociological statistics would have sufficed.
But her praxis of ‘tender empiricism’ narrated the proclivities and talents of each to
‘humanize’ fellow Germans in the hope of building empathy on the part of the AngloAmerican reader, with an aim to undermine their habit of thought about Germans,
reasoning it might help avert war.
Hans Albert Kluthe, founder of the German Freedom Party DFP (Deutsche
Freiheitspartei) in Paris in 1937 to aid anti-Nazi exiles, certified ‘on behalf of the
international headquarters of the DFP’ Linke was an ‘upstanding democrat for over
84
twelve years’ and contributor to ‘excellent educational work in England’ (Holl p. 77 fn
55). Leaving Britain in June 1939, as a progenitor of social justice, Linke continued her
praxis in Latin America; a consistency and continuity of ‘eternal motion’ across nations
and cultures in a sea of economic waves tossing common man to and fro. Disembarking
the Reina del Pacifico at Colon, Panama in the summer of 1939 in Andean Adventure
(1945), she wrote about a plethora of common man in the form of different ethnicity,
religion, and nationality (Gestalten) striving to overcome obstacles. With war months
away, a motley crew of travel-companions, who might never have joined the same
table, sat together. She wrote of them with the same empathy she had of fellow
Germans she organized for the trades union.
We were six round the table: Johnson, a tall, handsome Englishman returning to the tropics after
a holiday in Europe, who now acted as our guide—half a year later I learned that he was a crook,
but by then odd news of any kind no longer surprised me; Salvador, a young Peruvian whose
sunburnt figure might have enchanted a Greek sculptor, but for the shortness of his legs, on his
way home after twelve years of life and studies in Paris hardly remembering his still distant
country; a young Dutchman playing Pollux to the Peruvian Castor and travelling because he was
twenty years old, youth being in his opinion sufficient reason for moving across the world; a
German, who only by a miracle, or thanks to his peasant stubbornness and constitution, had
survived four years in a concentration camp, now on his way to Bolivia, where in time he hoped
to acquire a farm of his own; Hanna, a Czech Jewess with whose eighteen innocent years he had
fallen in love, and who was going to La Paz to join her father, hoping to find work as a beauty
specialist; and lastly myself (AA 7).
For a ‘lively intellect’, it was a chance to learn from diverse people with common
problems, never free from imbecile institutions, irrespective of identity or nation.
‘Waiting for mail, for money, for vital documents and visas, German and Polish and
Rumanian and Russian Jews, Czechs, and anti-Nazis from all over Central Europe spent
hours playing cards and telling one another their tragic or banal experiences’ (AA 9).
Her text mirrors Goethe’s way of seeing. ‘We can postulate a perceptive imagination
which apprehends identities and similarities… I do not mean an imagination that goes
into the vague and imagines things that do not exist; I mean one that does not abandon
the actual soil of earth’ (Bywater p. 301). Arıf Dirlik’s ‘difference in sameness’ comes
to mind (2002: 45).
In sum, Linke’s ability to transform unfortunate situations into a kind of fortune
was remarkable. Each fortunate encounter provided chances for Linke to learn and
assimilate new knowledge for the science of life. Astrida Orle Tantillo sees Goethe’s
science not one of repeating the same task but of ‘intensification’, Steigerung, that
changes the individual and the task, offering the individual potential for growth and
development (2002: 22). The principle of intensification incorporates feelings and
intuition to strive for perfection and is nature’s ability to overcome obstacles and to
85
create. For me this is a promising principle because it supports the idea Linke did
evolve from a self-regarding individual to other-regarding person. She practiced
Jameson’s idea of ‘shared humanity’ writing and living: ‘What ought to be’. Jameson
recognized her evolution. ‘In some way or other she annoyed the London Germans [...]
I think by being so full of life, so amazingly more developed, than they remembered
her. It is always hard to forgive people for growing faster than oneself’ (Holl p. 79).
Rather than endless wandering of a traveller, Linke’s praxis was goal oriented: ‘To live,
to work, to build a world where is freedom and bread for all’ (JN1 272).
86
—Chapter 4—
‘Spirit of Insubordination’
An Emancipatory Praxis
Her total lack of subservience was one of her most
surprising virtues. […] No authority as such, no difference
or age or class, made the faintest impression on her. She was
never defiant. She was simply, in all times and places, her
own boss.
—Margaret Storm Jameson (JN1 275)
Linke seemed to possess a ‘spirit of insubordination’ in the sense offered by Veblen
(1915/1964: 158). Thus far I explained how fortunate encounters set her on the way to
becoming an author, thanks largely but not exclusively, to the efforts of Stolper and
Jameson. Yet for Linke to be a malleable piece of clay in their hands—an apprentice to
be shaped, disciplined and approved as a master (Meister) in her own right—makes her
story incomplete and rather dull. On the contrary, I suggest she did not become a master
but chose instead to cultivate herself as a ‘masterless man’42 (Veblen 1914/1964: 276).
This chapter unpacks Veblen’s ideas on insubordination and relates them not only to
Linke’s experiences but also how this ‘spirit’ manifests itself in her authorship,
experiences and Weltanschauung. Her narratives reshape facts grossly manipulated by
‘phrase-makers’ (p. 26) in imbecile institutions. Writing ‘matter-of-fact knowledge’ (p.
62), she produced new knowledge as a counter-narrative to the dominant narrative of
business exploit, which for Veblen implied, the conversion of the energies of others to
one’s own end (1899/2009:14). Linke wove genres of journalism, documentary and
autobiography to craft truthful stories as an emancipatory praxis, similar perhaps, to
what Freire claimed as word=work=praxis (1970/1996: 68) to emancipate herself and
her readers with a hope to transform the world.
In June 1939, Linke arrived in Colon, Panama, gradually crossing the Andean
heartland of Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Bolivia, to settle in the mountain top bird’s
nest of peace, Quito, Ecuador, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1945 (Fig. 6). There,
she was a relatively autonomous agent, befriending economists, politicians, journalists,
42
Veblen’s term is not gender specific.
87
social workers, artists and writers—her new ‘fortunate encounters’. But not only this,
she worked for and with Ecuador’s marginalized poor, indigenous Quechua and
Ecuadorian common man. Employed by Ecuador’s leading liberal newspaper El
Comercio the editor gave Linke free reign to report on social and economic problems
and improvements in poor Quechua enclaves, affording her a chance to practice social
work. Even today, Linke is cited in labor and agricultural journals for her excellent
work on and approach to social problems and challenges Latin America faced and still
faces (Ibarra 2010: 147; 2011: 197). Galo Lasso Plaza (1906-1987), president of
Ecuador (1948-1952) and friend of Linke’s, was a respected leader for his ability to
engage with all socio-stratifications inclusive of the Quechua. Linke’s reciprocal
relations with Plaza, political economist Miguel Albornoz (1935-2012)—with whom
she frequently published (Linke and Albornoz 1960)—Alfredo Pareja Diezcanseco
(1908-1993) novelist, journalist and diplomat, she viewed a writer of the people (Linke
1956), Marxist poet Jorge Enrique Adoum and Manuel Agustín Aguirre, foundergeneral secretary of the Socialist Revolutionary Party of Ecuador (Partido Socialista
Revolucionario Ecuatoriano) were ‘lively intellects’ working for common good.
With no children of her own, Linke took her nephew Hans (youngest of her
brothers five children) out of post-WWII German poverty to settle him in Ecuador. The
Pacifico del Reina ship was under repair, which meant Linke had to find a temporary
school for Hans in England. Rejection letters from the Friends’ School in Great Ayton,
Yorkshire43 and the Friends’ School in Lancaster44 did not thwart her insubordinate
spirit. She secured a place at Newburgh Priory School in Coxwold, Yorkshire. Linke
expressed appreciation to Mrs Daws.45 Linke monitored Hans through correspondence
with the school and tried to encourage the Headmaster to have sympathy for him,
writing: ‘These last years in Berlin the only law was that of the survival of the fittest,
which explains his aggressiveness’.46 Lilo returned with Hans to Quito in the spring of
1948. His dream was to become a motor engineer, but Linke realized this would be
difficult in Ecuador. Despite efforts to help Hans, she was unsuccessful. A family
43
Letter from Friends’ School Great Ayton, Yorkshire, 13 October 1947. With permission, Marc Linke,
2013.
44
Letter from Friends’ School Lancaster, 11 October 1947. With permission, Marc Linke, 2013.
45
Letter from Lilo Linke to Mrs Daws, Newburgh Priory School, 21 October 1947. With permission,
Marc Linke, 2013.
46
Letter from Lilo Linke to Mrs Daws, Newburgh Priory School, 5 December 1947. With permission
Marc Linke, 2013.
88
memoir indicates Hans fled Quito for Colombia where he got into trouble with the
authorities.47
On a research visit to Quito in May 2012,48 I was unable to interview those
closest to her. Research of Linke’s Ecuadorian circle reveals evidence of a once ‘spirit
of insubordination’. In Calderon north Quito, Linke supported a ‘Radio School’ which
later became the Escuela Fiscal Mixta Lilo Linke (Fig. 8) in the early 1960s, providing
education to boys and girls five to twelve years of age from working-class families (Fig.
9). The school was a result of her endless work for social justice of the marginalized
poor and working class. On my visit there, I met young children who were bright and
enthusiastic students, just as Linke would have known them in her time. Linke’s picture
adorns the school walls and the pupil’s uniforms are embroidered with her name. I
interviewed one of Ecuador’s most renowned journalists I call N49 who told me about
Manuel Agustín Aguirre. ‘He was a big fighter and a grand leader of the socialist party’.
They wanted to terminate the capitalist system. There were many confrontations in textile
factories and beer factories… much exploitation. Workers were fighting to put in place a
workers code and syndicates. They were guided by the intellectuals. […] She was with the
writers, painters, and revolutionaries. The community was against American imperialism. In
1944 the government elected and accepted civil rights for workers. It wouldn’t have been
possible to get this far without the intellectuals in this struggle.
When I questioned him further about the poet Jorge Enrique Adoum, he smiled with
fondness and responded: ‘a grand poet […] He was a great intellectual and a bohemian.
He was very provocative. He was so talented. It was very interesting listening to him.
He was a Turk’. I found N’s reference to Adoum being a Turk curious. Adoum was
Syrian. Those of N’s generation considered anyone from that region of the world a
Turk. About the Turks, N added: ‘They sold a lot of textiles. They had big shops’. One
of Ecuador’s caricaturists, I call T,50 informed me about journalists in Linke’s era.
They had no schools for journalism. El Comercio was like a school for journalism. The editors
were the teachers. […] The rural community was vulnerable and there were community radios as
well. It began in Ecuador but spread to Peru, Bolivia and all Latin America. […] There was mass
poverty in the community and journalists were leaders in those times. And said when things
were not good.
When I asked him if journalists were unionized, he responded with an unequivocal ‘yes,
of course, permanently’. Of his ethical stance toward journalism, he admitted there were
three topics he never drew, ‘religion, women and children’. I found his wisdom
47
Personal memoirs of Hans Linke. With permission, Marc Linke, 2013.
Julian Assange took political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London 19 June 2012 shortly after
my return to London. For this reason, I do not wish to reveal full names of people interviewed.
49
Interview in his Quito home, 24 May 2012.
50
Interview in his Quito home, 28 May 2012.
89
48
enlightening, so different from the ‘phrase-makers’ in Europe today who believe
freedom of the press is the freedom to draw vulgar religious caricatures. I interviewed
the wife of a respected artist in Ecuador I call M.51 She told me Olga Fisch (1901-1990)
was a close friend of Linke. Born in Hungary, Fisch too, worked for common good
when she settled in Ecuador in 1939.
She was interested in popular art. […] She was a strong character with a good eye for art. She
bought indigenous art and guided the Quechua to convince them to work but with better
materials. […] Europeans appreciated things the Ecuadorians never did.
She improved their craftsmanship and thus their economy. The handicraft community is
a ‘spirit of individual self-sufficiency’ for Veblen (1915/1964: 270-71). Rodolfo Pérez
Pimentel52 wrote the following of Fisch’s contribution to Ecuador.
Galo Plaza invited her to his farm in Zuleta, where he had organized a shop with a group of
young embroiderers. Olga taught them how to make tablecloths and place mats embroidered
with traditional designs, adding a little fringe that was a popular feature in Central Europe. There
is still a prosperous cooperative in Zuleta, which offers jobs to many of the peasants.
M admitted her husband had been influenced by these efforts to help the indigenous.
We are all Mestizos. This wasn’t accepted by the so-called white people or by the Indians. The
Indians didn’t accept it because they thought they were ‘pure’. The whites didn’t want to accept
it because they didn’t want to be associated with the poor.
One of Ecuador’s most prominent women writers, I call A,53 told me: ‘The Ecuadorian
people should be grateful to her [Linke] because she talked about subjects that no one
else was interested to talk about. The person who always really discovers the country is
the foreigner’. I also interviewed a European woman who has lived in Ecuador over
twenty years I call B.54 She provided additional information on Linke, although she
never met her, because she came to Ecuador much later. B told me Linke was known
for her creativity and ability to inspire people. She worked to establish hygiene and
inoculation programs and contributed to the ‘Radio School’, where broadcasts reached
remote areas to overcome illiteracy. She helped the workers, farmers and women solve
their problems. Linke was a close friend to Arthur and Gene Fried who imported
construction machinery. Interestingly, those I interviewed were confused about Linke’s
identity. Some thought she was American, others said she was from London. A few
knew she was German. Linke likely had to be cautious owing to Latin American
suspicion of Germans being possible Nazi sympathizers.
51
Interview in their Quito home, 29 May 2012.
http://www.diccionariobiograficoecuador.com/tomos/tomo12/f2.htm (Accessed 10 September 2015)
53
Interview in her Quito home, 23 May 2012.
54
Interview with her in a Quito café, 22 May 2012.
90
52
Linke was a true embodiment of Veblen’s ‘spirit of insubordination’ owing to
‘instinct of workmanship’, ‘idle curiosity’ and ‘parental bent’. This spirit referred
neither to passionate, destructive rebellion—individual or en masse—nor to barbarism
that smashed civilization in the name of progress. Rather, humans possess an instinct
for effective work, an aptitude he called ‘instinct of workmanship’. Man is a selfconscious agent who sets ‘teleological’ activities. ‘He is an agent seeking in every act
the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his being
such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and distaste for futile effort’
(1899/2009: 16). The sense of workmanship instinctually values ‘[e]fficient use of the
means at hand and adequate management of the resources available for the purposes of
life’ (1914/1964: 31). ‘[I]t is a despicably inhuman thing for the current generation
willfully to make the way of life harder for the next generation, whether through neglect
of due provision for their subsistence and proper training or through wasting their
heritage and resources and opportunity by improvident greed and indolence’ (p. 26).
The New Order of ‘Big Business’ was the greedy culprit. (1923/1964: 211). Small-scale
industry of purposeful work to serve common good of the community cumulatively
evolved into industry for profit serving the vested interests. Industry became a ‘means
of making money, not of making goods’ (1923/2007: 85) that wastes human and natural
resources.
The ‘parental bent’ instinct may appear specific to caring and welfare of
children, but overall, it is concern for the common good and survival of the species as a
whole. ‘Parental bent’ tends to be more female, not as a biological trait, but a result of
cumulative causation across millenniums whereby womanhood was played up by a
scheme of ‘magical observances’ as ‘mother nature’ symbolized fertility, fecundity,
growth and nurture (1914/1964: 94). It is possible that Ecuadorian artist Andrade
Moscoso’s symbolism of mother-nature motifs, crafted on Linke’s tombstone at the El
Bátan cemetery in Quito (Fig. 10), responded to her Weltanschauung and Ecuadorian
cultural inheritance. Veblen thought women possess a stronger proclivity for the instinct
of workmanship. ‘The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman than upon the man
to live her own life in her own way’ (1899/2009: 232). In Linke’s case, she was not
fond of institutional authority.
Humans have a proclivity for ‘idle curiosity’ to explore the mystery of life. In
general ‘they want to know things, when graver interests do not engross their attention’
(1914/1964: 85). Curiosity was ‘idle’ for Veblen because while ‘no utilitarian aim
enters in its habitual exercise’ the ‘material information which is by this means drawn
91
into the agent’s available knowledge may none the less come to serve the ends of
workmanship’ (p. 88). Holl agreed Linke possessed an ‘insatiable curiosity’.55 Curiosity
led her authorship and labor for social justice, guided by a sense of workmanship and
parental bent to help rid Ecuador of illiteracy; promote hygiene and midwifery to lower
child mortality rates; stimulate children’s education through puppet theatre; support
unionization of journalists as their spokesperson; support better agricultural methods;
and improve the environment through reforestation projects. From where did Linke get
her a ‘spirit of insubordination’? From where did Veblen source this spirit? I turn to her
early childhood experiences.
Linke spent some of her formative years in East Prussia fraternizing with
peasant children and their families along the Baltic Sea and nearby inland enclaves like
Masuria. As her father was from Tannenwalde (Prussia) family visits there do not come
as a surprise. Linke began her autobiography Restless Days with a prologue titled ‘East
Prussia August First 1914’, an account of childhood summers there. Fond recollections
of sitting on the steps with peasant children, talking of the endless countryside, playing
together as the sun warmed their naked limbs, is evident in the following passage.
I knew the lakes and swamps from my earliest childhood. I remembered the woods through
which we had driven in a ranger’s car, the strong smell of horses’ sweat in front of us, and the
glow-worms which glittered around us at night. I remembered long walks over the soft moss and
the blue surprise when I suddenly stood on the border of a lake. Trees were fallen down into the
water, roes and birds came to drink, and we stood motionless to watch them. [...] It was the evergreen country of a fairy-tale, and it belonged to me, it was secretly my own (RD 11).
This nurturing habituation for Linke was the opposite in the metropolis where Simmel
observed ‘growing distance in genuine inner relationships and a declining distance in
more external ones’ (1907/2005: 481). Already habituated to urban society, or what is
termed Gesellschaft, these Prussians appear to have habituated her to an affinity with
community, or Gemeinschaft. Habituation not only to the urban but also to the rural
might justify the ease with which Linke later journeyed across diverse nations into their
most rural enclaves, affording her an ability to nurture genuine and uninhibited
relationships. In Masuria, Linke experienced other ways of doing, other ways of living,
other ways of being, from urban habituation that shaped individual and social relations
in its own likeness.
Children are sensitive to something wrong in their world. They flee in an
instinctive act of self-preservation to something, someplace or someone that offers a
shelter from unhappiness. Masuria was ‘secretly’ her own. Masuria wasn’t a ‘holiday
55
Interview with historian Karl Holl in his home in Bremen, Germany, February 2013.
92
destination’ for Linke—terminology that smacks of a capitalist mindset—rather it was
her shelter, a place to engage in social relations unlike those in Berlin. As a child, Linke
couldn’t explain her unhappiness. Only time and experience uncover unhappiness for
those few curious souls, like Linke, in search of ‘what ought to be’. Experiences lived
with East Prussian peasant children influenced her, evident in prioritizing them in her
prologue. But what cultural inheritance did these Prussian peasants possess? Did they
cultivate an alternative worldview and life-way akin to a ‘spirit of insubordination’?
Tucked amidst footnotes in Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution
(1915) Veblen’s cumulative causation methodology uncovered a peculiarity in the
Baltic littoral—during their pre-Christian and early handicraft era—what he viewed
habituation embodied in freedom, work, civic life and community as a ‘systematised
anarchy regulated by common sense’ (p. 323). Communities in western Russia (Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania), northern Poland and Germany, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark
and Iceland comprised the Baltic littoral.56 Habituation was a quasi-anarchistic ‘Live
and Let Live’ that for Veblen implicitly means peace, where the group flourishes and
also respects that other groups should flourish. Freehold farmers and traders in timber,
tools, flint and amber, they prospered peaceably (p. 45). The Baltic littoral mixed with
other cultures, borrowing ideas to improve technologies, yet maintained their culture by
discouraging ideas become ‘ultra-rigorous authenticity’ (p. 324). Simply, they resisted
being ruled by their knowledge. Veblen saw it ‘a civilisation of workmanship and
fecundity rather than of dynastic power, statecraft, priestcraft or artistic achievement’ as
in the Roman Empire (p. 43).
Veblen proposed that the Baltic littoral was a prototype of peaceable
habituation. Geographically isolated, people lived in autonomy of neighborly local selfgovernment. Laws were founded on ‘good will’ over canonical doctrines. For Veblen
‘insubordination is the vital principle of this defunct system of local self-government,
whereas it is the sin against the Holy Ghost of dynastic coercion’ (p. 327). Enough
neighborly contact to form a sense of solidarity, they were not governed by overt
surveillance (p. 323). Beliefs were built on the code of ‘neighborly common sense’ of
‘Live and Let Live’ (p. 327), not to be confused with the civil codes of John Locke as
‘natural rights’ tainted with ownership rights. Veblen posited that ‘common man must
by natural bent be gifted with a penchant for letting his neighbor live as good him
seems, within the same margin of neighborhood tolerance’; an ‘ideal of “justice”
56
This rich civilization has been evidenced in Baltic Stone-age artifacts.
93
according to the anarchistic conception’. He concluded this ‘anarchistic animus may
well mark a generic bent of the human race at large’ (p. 328).
Masuria—Linke’s ‘secret’ place—at that time, was a dense wilderness part of
the Baltic Heights (Conzen 1945: 1). The region was a ‘frontier community’
(Kłoskowska 1997: 37) where a dialect called Wasserpolen; a German-Polish mix was
spoken (Cordell 2009: 6). The people were considered ‘Germanized Poles’ (p. 8) and
were Protestant (Żarnowska and Pearson 1991: 302). Although East Prussia was
ethnically diverse (Orr 1980: 310) in 1804 Prussian authorities began to Germanize the
region (p. 311). Education of the peasantry was substandard (p. 306). Although land
east of the Elbe abounded with large estates, after 1820 the peasantry became
increasingly impoverished, reduced to agrarian laborers (Instleute) working on these
estates (p. 306). This social formation continued right up to the mid-twentieth century
(Żarnowska and Pearson p. 299). Ermland was the only exception where there was a
growth of independent peasant holdings (Orr p. 306 fn 9). For instance, during the 1848
revolt ‘impoverished Masuria, nestled away in its geographic isolation and ethnic
remoteness from the rest of the province, for the most part remained […] quiescent’ (p.
317). Characteristic of a Slav house-type, Masurian Schaluppe were made of timber and
had thatched roofs (Conzen p. 8). Masurian town plans differed from the rest of Prussia,
as they showed no evidence of fortification (p. 9).
Here exist some of Linke’s East Prussian childhood friends, perhaps souls with a
‘spirit of insubordination’. More than a wanderlust child enthralled by nature, Baltic
experiences impressed on the young Linke a tacit sense of ‘Live and Let Live’ over the
race for pecuniary gain in Berlin. For a child, the difference is inexpressible but it is
sensed, as Linke sensed there was something wrong in her home. Instead, a loving
touch, sharing of food, play with inventive children in a community living in relative
dignity—albeit poor—are experiences never to be removed from one’s sense of self.
Linke’s friends perhaps were practicing pedagogues of insubordination. Experiences
with them would have had profound psychological effects on the young Linke, evident
in her often expressing a longing for simplicity. Her everyday in Berlin was exactly the
opposite; fractured, contentious; and habituated to the pretentious habit of keeping up
appearances and subordination to authority. In search of a less complex life where
minds were less muddled, she offered: ‘I was always longing for simple, unreflecting
friendships, straightforward and not complicated by inexpressible thoughts and feelings’
(RD 15). Writing of fellow student Hein Flenter at the Akademie der Arbeit she
described him ‘simple as water’ (TWE 9). Of friend Madam Compan in Paris, Linke
94
wrote, ‘I had explained to her what I wanted: to see the life of the worker, the simple
man, the poor’ (TWE 91). Linke’s spirit of insubordination was both an instinct of good
intention in her, because Veblen thought all humans have this instinct, but was also
cultivated out of experiences in Masuria as a youth.
Prussia followed by the Weimar Republic had a militaristic tendency, sourcing
much of its predatory prowess from East Prussia. Hindenburg, Ludendorff and
Clausewitz were East Prussians. Veblen’s hypothesis seems porous, even contradictory,
to Baltic peaceable tendency. His analysis is as follows. Cumulative causation closed
paganism in the tenth century when the Viking enterprise, using former pagan kinship,
emulated the idea of raids from the Roman Empire (1915/1964: 306-07). Eleventh
century German Teutonic Knights under the Holy Roman Empire imparted on
Völkerwanderung (German migration) that persisted under Bismarck’s unification of
Germany (1871). Since the Baltic littoral was last to embrace Christianity in Europe,
feudal Prussian princes (Junker) fervently adapted to predatory habit, not having been
sufficiently habituated to corrosive power for centuries as those under the yoke of the
Roman Empire.
Workmanship, once done for the interests of the community, cumulatively
evolved into workmanship for interests of the State. The subject became a citizen. State
interests became the citizens’ interests. ‘The coalescence of the community’s consensus
of interest with the State’s ambitions is a coalescence by submission or abnegation,
whereby the community lends itself, willingly and even enthusiastically, as a means to
the State’s realisation of its own higher ends’ (p. 165). Notably, as a good German,
Linke obeyed the laws of the State, witnessed in her choice of political party
engagement, DDP and SDP over the KPD. A sensible patriot, she pushed the
boundaries of State but was not subordinate to militarism or nationalism. To my mind,
Linke was in a similar situation with the craftsmen centuries before in her decision to
work for democracy in Germany. Only when attempts failed, did she leave and ply her
trade (authorship and social work) wherever she journeyed, merely asking for a ‘chance
to live’.
German common man is not militaristic. Common man is endowed with
instincts for purposeful work but based on habituation and ‘native bias’ is also prone to
coercion on behalf of the vested interests that tease out latent predatory habits to serve
their interests, assumed to be state interests. To what extent common man becomes
divided—some siding with war, some siding with peace—is largely dependent on the
length of time they are habituated to militarism and take it for granted. Once the New
95
Order of economic success and pecuniary gain became the creed of the twentieth
century, common man largely learned to side with this order. Such habituation stifled
human potential for Veblen because ‘under the rule of the current technology and
business principles, industry is managed by businessmen for business ends, not by
technological experts or for the material advantage of the community’ (1914/1964:
351). Common man learned the habit of ‘self-interest’ through the directorate of
‘business interest’. Impersonal corporate capital replaced the former personal employerowner. Small-scale industry of purposeful work to serve common good of the
community evolved into industry for profit. Industry, for Veblen, became a ‘means of
making money, not of making goods’ (1923/1964: 85). ‘Business’ was very much the word of the day during WWI and the business of
hyperinflation that followed. Linke’s narrative about the young members she organized
for the union and the ‘business shape’ they were forced to fit in overnight is testament
to the new business order. Ernst Gläser, a German-Norwegian violinist and conductor,
expressed his experiences during WWI as follows:
Many began to make money out of the war. It became a sort of industry… We had experienced
the war as a great impulse to brotherhood; now we saw it suddenly declared to be a business
proposition. […] Had Germany become a firm and the war a commercial undertaking… (Gläser
cited in Vincent 1985: 19).
Should Gläser’s experiences seem unsubstantiated, according to Feldman: ‘Only two
groups may be said to have derived any benefits from the war: the industrialists and the
workers employed in the war industries’ (1966: 105). Under the New Order, it is
‘business as usual’. Business merely shifts from production of goods to production for
war. Arendt stressed the relationship between business and war in WWII. ‘Cooperation
between the S.S. and the businessmen was excellent’ when ‘famous German firms as I.
G. Farben, the Krupp Werke, and Siemens-Schuckert Werke had established plants in
Auschwitz as well as near the Lublin death camps’ (1992: 79). Business is war.
Religion and ethnicity become means to an end by business exploit. Loss of life is the
cost of doing business.
In the hyperinflation, the Leisure Class swept up the spoils then splashed their
leisure life-style across the new mass media.57 Driven by ‘self-interest’ of pecuniary
gain they became figures of emulation not only between themselves but also for
common man emulating their behavior. The learned habit compares possessions,
consumption and waste with those of another, what Veblen coined ‘invidious
57
Adam Fergusson wrote about social repercussions when money lost its value in Weimar (1975/2010).
96
comparison’ (1899/2009: 74). Common man is further lured away from a sense of
workmanship and instead works for a salary to keep up appearances in the display of
goods. Personal worth is measured by pecuniary standing. In the German case, common
man’s ‘native bias’ of duty to industry and the state clashed with the rapid penetration
of American business enterprise. Linke often used the word ‘swindle’, or as Veblen put
it ‘getting something for nothing’. Like many others, Linke too, frequented bars,
restaurants and cafés along Kurfürstendamm, awkwardly emulating the Leisure Class
institution. Existing on a knife-edge of seduction into prostitution, sober self-realization
or both,58 the following passage clearly indicates her eventual refusal of all the ‘sparkle’
and fanfare.
In the beginning I had been shy and awkward. [...] I never knew how to behave, what to say or to
do, I was hot and nervous, had not enjoyed it, and had gone through it all like an oppressive
dream. I even spoke English with Walter to give myself the appearance of a whimsical foreigner
and to make my mistakes seem intended as American and arrogant fancies. [...] I began to see
behind the screen of all this made-up life and luxury. At first immensely impressed and
overawed, I quickly become bored with it. The golden calf Inflation did not sparkle nor make me
dance and worship (RD 134).
Linke’s ‘spirit of insubordination’ made her question the ‘made-up life and luxury’ but
only after she had experienced it for a while and recognized its emptiness. An instinct to
do purposeful work grumbled within her. Experiences of the workers fervent resistance
and memories of an alternative life-way in Masuria, stirred hope to change her situation.
‘Masterless Man’
Veblen argued industrious peasants and craftsmen, for centuries, had an
instinctive spirit of insubordination within them. Owing to warring princes, craftsmen
fled barbarity to ply their trade wherever needed. Veblen had much to say about these
individuals calling them ‘masterless men’ (1914/1964: 276)—forerunners of eighteenth
century liberalism. A craftsman is a self-sufficient ‘creative agent standing on his own
bottom’ who has ‘an irreducible factor in the community’s make-up’ and ‘draws on the
resources of his own person alone’ not bound to a landlord and asks ‘nothing but an
even chance to do what he is fit to do’ (p. 235). Paradoxically, Linke would share
something in common with masterless men of yesteryear.
When Anglo-American vested interests clashed with Prussian industrial
efficiency, threatening the former’s economic supremacy, it sucked the rest of the world
into the vortex of war, leaving millions without property, possessions or prospects.
58
Linke’s narrative did not indicate she was involved in prostitution. She did often interview prostitutes
to learn about their circumstances. Many women did go into the trade in Weimar for mere survival.
97
Linke too, searched for a life-way and ‘chance to live’. Too young to escape as a child,
in 1933, she already anticipated WWII. Asking ‘nothing but an even chance to do what
he is fit to do’, Linke became a ‘masterless man’ in the sense offered by Veblen. ‘Man’s
life is activity; and as he acts, so he thinks and feels’ (Veblen 1934/1964: 85), is useful
here, as his premise naturally speaks to Linke’s activities and acts that shape her
thinking. The more Linke was habituated to the Weimar Republic in utter disorder, the
more her insubordinate instinct for justice grew increasingly bold and forthright. Unable
to rely on anything, self-preservation and reasoned common sense guided her to take
shelter in the community of a trades union—emulating the Wandervögel—that provided
some means for a sense of purposeful work. It gave her a chance to overcome learned
inferiority. Union participation, later introduced her to encounters with party politicians.
Following a speech she delivered in 1927 for the DDP at a local branch in the east of
Berlin she met a former lycée teacher. Linke had gradually come to recognize, ‘I was
free, not submissive to anyone, an independent citizen; in fact, more independent than
Dr. Müller himself, who at least in his profession had to obey instructions, whilst I had
nobody above me’ (RD 336).
In Britain, Linke continued to uphold ideas of justice although she conceded
German democracy had failed. Enlightening those she befriended in England to political
realities in Germany, she often faced a sea of indifference. British society was under the
spell of the new media and consumerism in the interwar period (Golubov 2002: 42).
Utilizing every chance to inform—those willing to listen—she challenged British habit
of mind. With unshakable conviction Linke posed provocative questions to poke holes
in habitual thought hoping to incite awareness to the plight of democratic Germans.
Critical of British-style socialism Jameson recalled Linke question their politics.
“But why is your Labour Party sitting glum and sad, repeating like old women: We must be
calm, do not let us be excited, keep very quiet and all will be well? Why don’t they wave their
arms and shout: We are socialists, let us fight?” | “Perhaps because they are English.” | “Oh, no.”
| Her smile showed strong perfect teeth, very white. | “This four weeks I am talking with people
of all classes, and they are not as if dead since years” (Emphasis added JN1 271).
Her observation was a pertinent one, an obvious end result of British business exploit.
Kropotkin wrote on the issue in his time. Merely belonging to a trades union or political
body cannot be taken as a manifestation of a mutual-aid tendency (1902/1987: 213).
Co-operation, especially in Britain, is often described as “joint-stock individualism”; and such it
is now, it undoubtedly tends to breed a co-operative egotism, not only towards the community at
large, but also among the co-operators themselves. It is, nevertheless, certain that at its origin the
movement had an essentially mutual-aid character (p. 214).
98
Jameson did not take offence at Linke’s penetrating questions but directed sharp
questions back, making for a healthy reciprocal exchange and new knowledge. While
Jameson took Linke’s assertiveness in her stride, less understanding friends asked:
‘What the devil do you see in this half-educated conceited gutter-snipe with her
intolerable airs of knowing better’ (JN1 311)? Jameson’s response was telling. ‘I am
drawn irresistibly to all I am not and would like to have been [...] to this German girl’s
energy, essential innocence, fearlessness, invincible gaiety’ (JN1 310). Her ‘surprising
virtues’ as a masterless man appear to have intrigued Jameson. Simply she viewed
Linke ‘her own boss’ (JN1 275).
In Veblen’s mind, masterless man was capable of working without a master,
Meister, for common good. Rancière echoes Veblenian thinking when he states, ‘the
human soul is capable of teaching itself by itself, and without a master’ (1991: 139).
Linke cultivated friendships with other masterless souls. Ralph Bates was one such
person. He journeyed to Spain and worked with and wrote about workers in the olive
fields and was an advocate of partisan solidarity against Franco’s fascism. The Olive
Field (1936) is a story of both the love Bates experienced in a community working for
its betterment and survival and also the atrocities experienced when small tenant
farmers buckled under Franco’s dictatorship and committed suicide. Bates captured
truthful stories from below. His following passage exposes how the Spanish
government dealt with the workers. ‘Civilized Government [...] composed of Radicals
and Catholic Christians [...] bring in coloured moslems to put down the Spanish
workers’ (p. 453). Hauntingly reminiscent of Anglo-American imperialism in the
Middle East today, Moors arrived with the Foreign Legion from Africa. ‘It can’t be
true... they’d never do it,’ he whispered (p. 452).
Jameson’s proposal that by living in another society individual behaviour would
evolve to ‘counteract selfishness and self-interest’, vis-à-vis service to the community,
appears commensurate with Veblen’s instinct to work for common good. Linke’s
numerous talks on BBC radio programs aimed at enlightening British audiences to what
other cultures were thinking and doing to work for common good. Despite good
intentions to document their workmanship, imbecile institutions tried to minimize and
diminish Linke’s ‘good will’ messages of democracy, peace and justice, especially in
nations Britain perceived inferior.
Research of her BBC radio scripts reveals evidence of her insubordinate spirit.
99
In a script titled In The Jungle of Yucatan (1948),61 Linke spoke about how the Mexican
government was actively involved in building schools and educating rural enclaves of
pure Maya Indians—‘who have never submitted to any outside authority’—near Dzula
on the flat peninsula adjacent to British Honduras. Eighty people from the Mexican
Cultural Mission ‘have nothing to do with religion’, Linke wrote (p. 6). The love and
dedication of José (an engineer), with an aim to help fellow Mexicans, resembled
Veblen’s call for governance by a ‘Soviet of Technicians’ (1921/2001: 83), perhaps a
motivation inspired by the Mexican Revolution. Linke’s script confirmed Mexico’s
self-progress and self-emancipation. But parts of the script were crossed out indicating
censorship on behalf of the institution. She wrote: ‘The Mexican government is doing a
lot for education, and, as a rule, even, in out-of-the-way places I found the Mexicans
most eager to learn’ (p. 3). This was crossed out. Concluding her talk, Linke highlighted
the main reason for their success. ‘They have the right outlook, but they have also
something which is perhaps even more essential: love for the people among whom they
work, out there in the jungle of Yucatan’ (p. 7). This too, was crossed out. Linke
emphasized the ideas of Carlos (leader of the Mission) as a sound approach to work for
common good and social justice. This passage was not censored, perhaps if only
because, methods used would be perceived primitive and reproduce a dichotomy of
superior-inferior for the BBC radio audience. It read:
You have to go slow. It’s no good trying to change century-old habits overnight. First, we’ll help
the villagers to build a pump and water-tank, instead of the primitive open well they are using
now. Then we’ll say to them: Why don’t you grow some flowers round the tank and make a little
park? They love flowers, and they’ll certainly grow furious when the pigs will ruin the park.
Then we’ll say: why don’t you put the pigs into a sty? They’ll say: oh, but then we’ll have to
feed them, and we have only just enough maize for ourselves. Then we’ll say: we’ll show you
how to select your seeds and use better methods of agriculture so that you will get twice as big a
crop as now. You see, you start with something basic, in this case the water, and then the rest
follows. If we forced them to lock up their pigs just now, we would only get a revolution, and
they might even kill us. You have to be patient. That’s the way progress is brought about (p. 7).
Thus, Linke teaches her audience ‘patience’ is the way to evolve entrenched century-old
habits not force or violence. Her statement is of a tender empiricist understanding the
doing and thinking of other cultures. But business is impatient. Investors want profits.
Another script titled Not As Easy As ABC (1948)62 remained unscathed.
Speaking on a literacy program for illiterate adults in Ecuador, Linke was critical of
taking a film-van up into remote Indio villages in the Andes—where many never saw a
film before—that not only screened a film but also news reels about bayonet practices
61
62
Lilo Linke, In The Jungle of Yucatan, 5 April 1948, 09:15 - 09:30 am. BBC Archives, Reading, UK.
Lilo Linke, Not As Easy As ABC, 14 June 1948, 09:15 - 09:30 am. BBC Archives, Reading, UK.
100
of American assault troops. Embarrassed, Linke could not face the Indios afterward and
wrote a scathing but true account of barbarism at the hands of business interests.
Technical backwardness has hitherto kept them unaware of man’s world-wide inhumanity to
man; unaware of the tinsel and shabbiness of our age; unaware of cheap comic strips and
gangster films; unaware of atom bombs, and, most important, of our growing doubts in our own
survival. Maybe you agree that, just as racial discrimination is not so much the problem of the
so-called inferior races as of the discriminator, so illiteracy in the world of today is really the
problem of the literates. [...] If we want real progress, humility will have to replace our
arrogance (Emphasis added p. 6-7).
A point well taken here is her mention of ‘inferior’ races as not the ones to blame but
rather the ‘discriminator’. Arrogance must be overcome. Linke forever fought against it.
Linke was commissioned by the Royal Institute of International Affairs in
London to write a comprehensive study on Ecuador. But the Royal Institute had little
intention to publish an autobiography, and made it clear Linke was to construct a reified
political, economic and social study based on pure facts—a guide for Anglo-American
visitors, business or otherwise. Ecuador: A Country of Contrasts (1954) was the result.
Meeting notes from the Royal Institute reported the ‘draft synopsis submitted by Miss
Linke did not conform to the pattern of the other information studies but that this had
been posted before she had received the copy of Mr Butland’s Chile’.63 If a satisfactory
synopsis were produced she would be invited to undertake the study. Not wanting to
conform, yet full of good intention, the Research Secretary Miss Cleeve received a
stubborn response from Linke.
I hope to be allowed to be a little bit more analytical and critical than Mr. Butland in his book on
Chile which in my opinion is written a little too much in Ye-Oulde-Textbook manner, both as far
as content and style are concerned.64
She pushed for inclusion of diverse voices to ensure authenticity and to see their
situation, as would a tender empiricist, careful to avoid the ‘outsider’s lack of
understanding’.
I have always felt that it was a very good thing to quote people of the country to write about
—politicians, writers, journalists, etc. This gives authenticity to the book, and also obviates
the necessity of being too critical oneself (which might be interpreted as an outsider’s lack of
understanding), by using a spokesmen well-known and generally respected nationals.65
Dissatisfied with their proposed title of the book, Linke firmly but kindly put it:
63
Chatham House Library (The Royal Institute of International Affairs), Extract from the minutes and
agenda of the Research Committee, 37th Meeting, 20 May 1952, Registry File 10313/2, Point 635.
64
Chatham House Library (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) Registry File 10313/2, Letter
from Lilo Linke to Research Secretary Miss Margaret Cleeve, 16 June 1952.
65
Ibid.
101
The title he [Professor Humphreys] suggests (Ecuador—a Land Divided) would be excellent for
a chapter, but maybe a shade too strong for the whole book. ‘Small Country of Great Contrasts’
would be less absolute, but perhaps more appropriate.66
Clearly, Linke conceived another type of study from the centuries-old habit of divide
and rule. Rejecting the contentious title ‘A Land Divided’, intent on writing with
authenticity by using diverse voices to ensure an even-handed point of view, her sense
of responsibility was real. Evidently, these were not the principles of the Royal Institute.
That autumn, Linke was invited to undertake the study, but it was noted, only ‘with the
addition of special chapters on the position of the Church and of the Army’.67 Her study
would be one in a reputable series: The Latin America Information Studies. Acceptance
of the project meant furthering her reputation. Exploiting the institution, Linke used
royalties accrued from the commissioned work to direct future projects to better
common man.
Linke journeyed to Bolivia in 1952 to document the tin-miners struggle for
nationalization of the mines, under the exploit of three corporations that pilfered the
lion’s share of Bolivian revenues. Living with the tin-workers, meeting the MNR
Movimiento Nacionlista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement), and
learning of the tensions between business exploit and Bolivian common man, she wrote
Viaje por una Revolución [Journey Into a Revolution (1956)]. Prior to embarking on the
project, Linke wrote the Research Secretary, offering a book proposal on Bolivia.
I should like to write the book as near the truth as anybody could hope to get it, and should it
turn out too offensive for people here, I might either publish it under a pseudonym or just be
brave and face the consequences. It is high time somebody spoke out freely, because I feel we
don’t get anywhere with all this polite fixing of smoke screens. [...] That is why attempts at
reaching a solution of national problems such as the one now under way in Bolivia are so
interesting. I have therefore decided to spend my three-month-summer-vacation there this year. I
want to compare with my impressions nearly ten years ago when the Bolivian National
Revolutionary Movement was still in its infancy (Emphasis added).68
Once again, Linke’s insubordinate spirit was willing to ‘face the consequences’ to work
for the common good. Moreover, a closer read of her statement reveals her aim to
capture their social evolution in how these events affected Bolivia ten years on. Ann
Zulawski (2010), in researching Che Guevara in Bolivia, argues Linke had a keener
insight on the issues than Che himself. In Zulawski’s words:
66
Ibid.
Chatham House Library (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) Extract from the minutes and
agenda of the Research Committee, 38th meeting, 21 October 1952, Registry File 10313/2, Point 651.
68
Chatham House Library (The Royal Institute of International Affairs) Registry File 10313/2, Letter
from Lilo Linke to Research Secretary Miss Margaret Cleeve, 3 May 1952.
102
67
During her stay Linke attended union meetings and learned about working-class life. She
reported that many of the miners there and in other mines had come from the countryside, where
they had been hacienda colonos or had had access to small plots of land. This information shows
a connection between peasants and workers that Guevara did not recognize, seeing the miners as
militant proletarians and the peasants as indigenous people unable to defend themselves (p. 197).
Linke’s Bolivian narrative was written during McCarthy’s witch-hunt regime against
the Left and was promptly rejected by British and American publishers. Another
insubordinate soul, her friend Jorge Enrique Adoum, ensured its publication in Spanish.
Authorship as Insubordination: word=work=praxis
Forever sensing possible death amidst Prussian/Weimar militarism of war, in the
revolutionary armed conflict in her neighborhood and severe malnutrition she suffered
during the blockade in WWI, authorship for Linke was a means not only to express
certain truths but also to confirm her existence as a common sense, rational being.
Media in Prussia and later in the Weimar Republic took on a distinctly inflammatory
tone. Rivaling political parties, class warfare, strikes, frequent elections, the Inflation,
education reforms, mass unemployment, expropriation of princes and re-armament, to
name a few, comprised the material for ‘phrase-makers’ to propagate disorder over
order required for democracy to function. Headlines obfuscated the ‘facts’ with
predatory passions of honor—‘With God for King and Country’ or ‘All Power to the
Councils’ or ‘stab in the back defeat’ to coerce Germans to side with the Right or Left.
For Plotkin and Tilman: ‘Dispassionate common sense is just what prevailing
institutions seek to complicate and mediate with an array of chronically dissatisfied and
highly personal longings and passions’ (p. 200). Imbecile institutions ‘mix messages
and conflate symbols’ (p. 181). For Vincent, intellectuals were coaxed to side with war.
Deep emotion cannot be sustained indefinitely, either in an individual or in a people.
Recognizing this fact, the leadership in each country won the intellectual to its cause. Poets,
novelists, journalists; a tremendous number in each country excited the population to fever pitch
and cultivated the seeds of hatred so skillfully that even the unprejudiced began to believe that
justice was solely on the side of their respective countries. When combined with the terrible
demands of total war, the propaganda of World War I was only too successful in creating mass
hatred and mass delusion (1985: 23).
In this excerpt, it is precisely seen how common man became habituated to war.
Ironically, even as capitalism made information and its reproduction accessible, it
skillfully managed to muddle minds. The few rejecting the dominant discourse—Left
liberals, pacifists, internationalists, Linke and her fortunate encounters—utilized their
dispassionate common sense to express alternative notions of ‘truth’ against the ‘fable’
of their age. Liberal thinker José Ortega y Gasset read his epoch as ‘accession of the
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masses to complete social power’ (1930/1964: 11). But this mass power is not one of
other-regarding, as would be an enlightened revolution, but more of self-regarding
masses prone to propaganda and consumer habit. ‘The mass crushed beneath it anything
that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody
who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being
eliminated (p. 18). Despite constant angst and fear for their future, Linke put her
proclivity for ‘idle curiosity’ to purposeful use based on a real need to re-shape
manufactured facts. Mixing genres of journalism, documentary and autobiography, she
worked to craft truthful stories. I now unpack each genre.
Journalism became a dominant discourse in her era. Newspapers documented
and delivered ‘facts’ about events. A few writers, poets, literary critics and intellectuals
were uneasy and skeptical about the influence of journalism over society. Walter
Benjamin quoted the founder of Le Figaro (Villemessant) who stated the nature of mass
information means, ‘an attic fire in the Latin Quarter is more important than a
revolution in Madrid’ (1939/2007: 88-89). Information became muddled, not just facts.
Articulating ideas or stories to others was difficult. For Benjamin: ‘If the art of
storytelling has become rare, the dissemination of information has had a decisive share
in this state of affairs’ (p. 89). Storytellers once crafted stories as a form of ‘counsel’
that were ‘woven into the fabric of real life’ as a form of ‘wisdom’. ‘The storyteller
takes what he tells from experience—his own or that reported by others. And he in turn
makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.’ But Benjamin was
pessimistic about the genre. ‘The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic
side of truth, wisdom, is dying out’ (p. 87). Even though Benjamin thought ‘counsel’
was rapidly decreasing because ‘communicability of experience is decreasing’ (p. 8687) this does not mean storytelling has ended. I suggest Linke wrote stories of counsel
that are pedagogical. There is much to learn from them. Fortunately, Rancière is less
pessimistic than Benjamin. He sees the craft of writing a means to overcome superiorinferior as ‘the unique chance of intellectual emancipation’. He put it:
each citizen is also a man who makes a work, with the pen, with the drill, or with any other tool.
Each superior inferior is also an equal who recounts and is in turn told by another, the story of
what he has seen. It is always possible to play with this relation of self to self, to bring it back to
its primary veracity and waken the reasonable man in social man (1991: 108).
While Benjamin might be justified for his pessimism, the need to read or hear a story is
still with us, especially if we take into account Veblen’s assertion there is an instinct, no
matter how suppressed, that stubbornly wants to work for common good.
Veblen observed there was a shift in language use he called ‘matter-of-fact
104
knowledge’. This way of thinking evolved as new habits of mind—practiced in the act
of work, skill and industry—became a means to create new knowledge or ‘patterns for
matter-of-fact industrial insight’ (Plotkin and Tilman 2011: 120). Tilman carried the
point further and argues, ‘matter-of-fact’ is hostile to coercion, religion, loyalty,
subjection, superstition, ritual and tradition. Matter-of-fact ‘deserves a privileged
position as a habit of thought that leads to knowledge and values that are superior to
their ceremonially encapsulated opposites’ (1996: 229). Plotkin and Tilman, quoting
Veblen, state: ‘It is the constant care of the pillars of society to see that... antiquities of
the human spirit’—the sentimental values of emulation, business as usual, patriotism,
and religion—are not overly “sterilized” by clear thinking’ (p. 185). Advances in the
industrial arts brings clearer thinking to sweep away religious, superstitious, ritualistic
language, thus more pragmatic. Linke’s statement about Verdun when she traveled there
strikes me as matter-of-fact, making it clear war is business for the vested interests, after
they transformed fields of slaughter into a tourist destination. ‘They always say that the
French make a business out of their battlefields’, wrote Linke (TWE 42). ‘Matter-offact’ in the poems of the Russian futurist poet Mayakovsky also come to mind.
We’re needed in Moscow, | me and you, | there’re not enough | of our long-legged sort. | But
with those legs | you won’t be passing | through snow | and typhoid-typhoons. | Here they give
them | for caressing | at banquets | for oil-tycoons (Mayakovsky 1928).
Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia’s rapid industrialization brought
new habits of thought and innovative forms of documentation, as in cinema. Sergei
Eisenstein stated: ‘Cinema first and foremost is montage’ (1963: 28) and ‘montage is
conflict’ (p. 38), the very essence of conflict in being. Eisenstein’s montage directed a
new way of seeing. ‘The film’s job is to make the audience “help itself,” not to
“entertain” it’ (p. 84). Cinema, as new media par excellence—synthesis of art and
industry—influenced writers and artists alike. Slatan Dudow’s montage in Kuhle
Wampe: Or Who Owns The World (1932)69 used startling juxtapositions. For instance, a
husband reads a newspaper article to his wife about the sensational life of Dutch
courtesan Mata Hari, juxtaposed with his wife tabulating inflationary food prices in a
notebook. In support of facts, then, narrative need not be either/or but a synthesis of fact
and story, intelligently woven into film and autobiography alike. Not mere
documentation, it is juxtaposition of visuals and facts that bring new knowledge.
Briganti (2007) argues while Storm Jameson ‘pursued the political allegiance to the
69
Linke wrote a review of the film. It was published in ‘Radikaldemokratische Blätter’ where she also
briefly engaged with the Radical Democratic Party (Wenhold 2011: 99). 105
documentary that brought together socialist writing, the documentary film movement,
and the anthropology of Mass-Observation, she could not see that egalitarianism and
democracy would be much encouraged merely by documenting the lives of the working
classes’ (p. 82-83). Jameson’s view is commensurate with Eisenstein. As with film a
novel must ‘help’ an individual, not ‘entertain’ the reader.
Linke’s autobiographies—written as ‘matter-of-fact’ knowledge—crafted both
experience and fact into storytelling that documented social evolution based on lived
experience across diverse geographies. She may have borrowed Jameson’s praxis of
daily note taking of conversations (JN1 291) to construct dialogical texts of authenticity.
Kazin (1964) posed, ‘the autobiographical mode can be an authentic way of establishing
the truth of our experience’ (p. 216). Reshaping the facts—real names, dates and
places—is the convention of the narrative of autobiography. Linke wrote her stories as a
form of ‘counsel’ with pedagogy in mind, not only for self-knowledge but as an act of
reciprocal exchange, trusting the intelligence of the reader to unlearn the learned of illused fact. Storytelling is emancipatory for Rancière. ‘The very act of storytelling, an act
that presumes in its interlocutor an equality of intelligence rather than an inequality of
knowledge, posits equality, just as the act of explication posits inequality’ (1991: xxii).
Linke’s authorship, I suggest, represents the equilibrium of action (social work)
and reflection (authorship). Reliant on reciprocal exchange, her narrative praxis and
life-way was commensurate with a Goethean ‘conscious-process-participation
epistemology’ (Wahl) and mirrored the pedagogical praxis of Freire. True action leads
to reflection and vice-versa for Freire. Trusting the oppressed and ‘their ability to
reason’ is emancipatory (1970/1996: 48). A writer must go to the people. For Benjamin:
‘A great storyteller will always be rooted in the people, primarily in a milieu of
craftsmen’ (1939/2007: 101). For Freire, dialogue is itself ‘the word’ of ‘reflection and
action’ (1970/1996: 68) but equilibrium is necessary between reflection and action.
‘When a word is deprived of its dimension of action, reflection automatically suffers as
well; and the word is changed into idle chatter, into verbalism’ (p. 68) losing its
transformative power. On the other hand, if action occurs without reflection ‘the word is
converted into activism [...] action for action’s sake [and] negates true praxis and makes
dialogue impossible’ (p. 69). What gives Linke’s narrative such value is evident in her
passage on Carlos from the Mexican mission. Her inclusion of ‘love’ as central for
rational and responsible social change reflects Freire’s thinking. ‘If I do not love the
world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue’ (p.
71). Linke’s workmanship is an act of love to cultivate word=work=praxis. In no way,
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then, was her work tainted with a mindset bound up in superior-inferior and worthyunworthy, so propagated by business exploit, imperialism, scientific and colonial gaze.
Linke’s method of writing, analysis and conclusions, along with her way of
living was that of ‘tender empiricism’. For instance, when writing of Colombian
children she suggested ‘co-operation’ (reciprocal exchange) would bring about their
improvement.
As conditions in Europe improve, so they will improve here. The best way out is that of
co-operation. I found a living example of it among the shoe-shiners of Bogotá, with whom I
made friends in order to learn more about their struggle for existence (AA 94).
Goethe’s notion of reciprocity brings infinite knowledge while for Freire reciprocity is a
move toward ‘humaniziation’ because as the ‘oppressors dehumanize others and violate
their rights they themselves also become dehumanized’ (p. 38).
The pursuit of full humanity, however, cannot be carried out in isolation or individualism, but
only in fellowship and solidarity; therefore it cannot unfold in the antagonistic relations between
oppressors and oppressed. No one can be authentically human while he prevents others from
being so (p. 66).
Linke was dehumanized and struggled to overcome dehumanization by reconstructing
her life, through acts and authorship. For Kazin: ‘The writer seeks to press his
consciousness into being—to convert his material openly and dramatically into a new
human experience’ (p. 214). Linke’s praxis was two-fold: work for common man across
cultures and word to enlighten and emancipate the reader—autobiography as
emancipatory pedagogy. The result is an emancipatory praxis that does battle with
manufactured knowledge of academia; an evolution of knowledge not collection of
knowledge for domination, what Goethe accused of scientists in his epoch. Linke
rewrote facts to write truthful stories. An insubordinate spirit, she challenged the
‘phrase-makers’ of ‘Ye-Oulde-Textbook’.
I have selected several examples from her oeuvre. Resembling Goethe’s method
of intuitive perception—‘ability to survey an object in every detail’ to ‘grasp it
correctly’—Linke uses intuition(s) (Anschauungen) to see anew the similarities of
human injustice across cultures. Cumulative thought-experience acts as her perceptive
imagination through seeing (Anschauen) to form common sense reason (Vernunft) as a
synthesis that confronts the assumed superiority of British and European culture.
Juxtaposing one experience within another, she expressed injustice in the following
passage through the synthesis of a Berlin and London experience. ‘Day after day we had
to queue up for the barest necessities of life. When I came to London a few years ago
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and saw the waiting crowds outside the theatres my mind was haunted by a bitter
memory’ (RD 32). ‘Cultural synthesis’ for Freire is the,
mode of action for confronting culture itself, as the preserver of the very structures by which it
was formed. Cultural action, as historical action, is an instrument for superseding the dominant
alienated and alienating culture. In this sense, every authentic revolution is a cultural revolution
(p. 161).
Linke proposed ‘Londoners’ were neither superior nor inferior to Latin Americans but
rather humans that all face the same injustice. ‘The physical power of man is surprising.
Maimed or bombed or hunted, lepers, Londoners, refugees, they all carry on with their
lives in the face of illness and hunger and death’ (AA 60). Writing on the regionally
unemployed in Ecuador she drew parallels with Britain.
Yet it is possible to live for years in coastal towns like Lima or Guayaquil without once being
reminded of the Indians. Like the unemployed miners of Great Britain, they are tied to definite
geographical regions and may never enter the vision and consciousness of their compatriots in
other parts of the country. But, like the miners, they deeply influence the fate of the rest by
forming a sore spot in the body politic and economic that is poisoning the blood (AA 36).
Linke wrote what she lived and lived what she wrote. Writing narratives of hope, she
crafted herself a figure of emulation, inspiring a kind of ‘follow me’ for her readership.
Kazin believes an author sets himself up ‘as a model for emulation’ (p. 211). In a
chapter titled ‘The Fight for Health in the Tropics’ (AA 53) she remarked on the
experience of volunteering. ‘To encourage a little girl who resisted with all her might
the energetic nurse’s attempts to push the spoon into her mouth, I swallowed a small
dose myself, and I immediately felt like howling with the rest’ (AA 63). In Cancel All
Vows (1938), her first attempt at a novel, Linke used protagonist Marthe Jansen as a
self-portrait (Holl 1987: 75). Her story told about experiences ordinary refugees lived in
France; lawyers, unionists, judges, university professors amongst countless common
man (CAV 137). CAV also explored the German male psyche struggling with regret for
participation in WWI. A passage between Julius (German veteran without one leg) and
Marthe (German refugee student) meeting in the Tuileries Garden in Paris, offers her
reader a glimpse at Marthe’s un-habitual behaviour when Julius asks:
“Do you never feel sorry for being a waitress in a miserable French restaurant—and one who
works illegally at that—instead of being a doctor in Hamburg?” | Again the expression of
surprise rounded her face, and again she laughed, two dimples forming in her cheeks: | “Dear
me, no. What does it matter? It is all the same. And if I get some money, I might become a
doctor yet.” [...] He leaned back, more and more impressed. […] Were women always more
courageous than men, or was Marthe an exception? She must be good company, he thought,
always full of vitality and content with little. Could one learn these things from her? […] In any
case, Marthe was probably stupid and insensitive to more subtle emotions. And of course, there
was that obvious lack of breeding (CAV 24-25).
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The excerpt above is filled with contradictions, done on purpose, I suggest, to provoke
the reader. Not only does Linke reflect that she (Marthe) no longer gives worth to
certain employment status, nor does she attach value to pecuniary gain. ‘Could one
learn these things from her?’ Linke constructs the female protagonist as a woman of
courage who one can learn from. Moreover, Linke attacks the notion of ‘breeding’ an
honorific habit of yesteryear, carried over to and taught in imbecile institutions everpresent in the twentieth century. The narrative has a sense of gaiety. Linke’s mode of
writing expressed hope despite the reality of gloomy despair amongst refugees in Paris.
When Marthe and her friends at café Nègre Joyeux on Rue Mouffetard received news of
their friend Franz, beheaded by the Gestapo, to endure this horrific event, Linke still
wrote a message of hope.
She [Marthe] was no coward—though she smiled when people called her brave—but she wanted
to live with all the intensity of her being, and death—even heroic death—was denial and to her
the eternal end of all things (CAV 190).
Holl asserted Linke’s positive message in Cancel All Vows illustrated a personal stake
in embracing and constructing life. ‘Her way through exile is covered as part of the
narrative in Cancel All Vows, not as an inescapable fate to be suffered passively, but as
an [integral] part of a life plan to be shaped through her own responsibility’ (1987: 75).
Another instance where Linke was a ‘model of emulation’ was the speech she
gave on the BBC radio program ‘Young Ideas’ offering counsel about money.
Some rich people seem to think that you can only enjoy life when you are poor. I have just
received a letter from a wealthy Belgium woman, who says that she envies me because I have
tramped all over Europe with only a few coppers in my pocket. ‘You make friends with
everybody’, she writes, ‘and everybody is kind to you and helps you. You get the whole world
for nothing, whilst I have to pay for everything without ever getting my money’s worth’. I must
confess I can’t really pity her. I never found it difficult to get rid of my money. A number of
years ago I was fed up with my life. I was then rather a sentimental girl. One day I found I had a
twenty mark note in my pocket and there didn’t even seem to be much sense in spending it, so I
changed it into twenty silver pieces and distributed one after the other to the beggars of
Hamburg. But when I met the twentieth beggar, I turned my back on him and went into a
restaurant to buy myself some food with the last mark that was left. A month afterwards I was on
my way to France. I only hope the twentieth beggar has meanwhile forgiven me (Linke 1935b).
The above excerpt speaks of a changed Linke—suggesting others change—an evolved
person who no longer worships money but is in search of love (upright gait and
purposeful work), the love she eventually found in home (Heimat) in Ecuador.
Linke’s storytelling wrote of industry and work, on the one hand, and of her
struggle to overcome coercive habituation, on the other. She aimed to expose that which
was taught in ‘lurid adventure’ folktales, which according to Donson propagated
national sentiment on the eve of WWI (2004: 579). ‘Their stories portrayed girls and
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boys whose bravery and sacrifice ensured Germany’s victory’ (p. 581). Fairy tales were
the most popular genre of youth literature (p. 582). Girls and boys also read German
romantic masterpieces, ‘Goethe’s Gotz von Berlichingen, Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell,
Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas, Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm’ and foreign classics like
‘Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, James Fenimore Cooper’s
Leatherstocking Tales, and Daniel Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe’ (p. 581-82). War
literature promoted that courageous killing of the enemy brought pleasure (p. 589).
Fairy and folk tales have also been manipulated across the ages. For instance,
French Orientalist Antoine Galland (1646-1715), in search of identity to counteract the
other, wrote Les Milles et Une Nuits (The Thousand and One Nights) as twelve
volumes. Having learned Arabic, he did more than translate their tales. ‘He actually
adapted the tales to suit the tastes of his French readers, invented some of the plots and
drew material from an Arabic informant to form some of his own tales’ (Zipes 2006:
73-74). Following in Galland’s footsteps, Pétis de la Croix (1653-1713) crafted similar
exotic embellishment to the Turkish folktale (p. 73-74). Around 1808, Dortchen Wild
passed her knowledge of oral folktales on to Wilhelm Grimm. Revised no less than
seven times, when Hansel and Gretel was published as Kinder- und Hausmärchen
(Children’s and Household Tales) in 1857 much of its gruesome content was eliminated
to suit new socialization (p. 196). Linke read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Robinson Crusoe
(RD 20) and occasionally referenced fairy tales.
Not only reading fairy tales in her youth, Linke’s days as an apprentice in the
children’s section of the Berlin bookshop, inevitably, made her familiar with the genre.
Jameson, a savvy literary agent, would have sensed the challenges Linke faced as a nonnative English writer from Weimar and may have suggested her autobiographies be
published as pseudo adventurous tales to appeal to an English reader. They would not
attract the gaze of Hitler’s Brown Network. ‘She was like Ulysses, pleased to have a
story to tell’ (Jameson cited in TWE xxxvi). Jameson fondly called her the ‘goose-girl’
of the German fairytale. Linke’s physical appearance and circumstances—pauperized,
attractive young women turned wayfarer—might have inspired the idea. Artist Willi
Soukoup illustrated woodcuts for Restless Days, to add visual craftsmanship to Linke’s
truthful story but they did not appear in the published work.71
To clarify, Linke did not write fairytales per se, but borrowed terms from the
genre. The title Tale Without End and the use of ‘adventure’, ‘journey’, ‘fable’ and
‘tale’ allude to a transition from despair to hope but are also forms of affirmation to an
71
Soukoup’s woodcuts appear in the German translation recently published in 2005.
110
illusion. Once upon a time… we had money. Once upon a time… there was work. Of
the Inflation she wrote: ‘Again and again fate hurled the helpless individual into the
boiling kettle of a wicked witch’ (RD 131). Twists and turns, lost then found,
convention and reinvention, the reader never knows where Linke might end up on the
journey of love and knowledge.
In Tale Without End, Linke told stories of French common man and their
instinct of workmanship as canut silk weavers, wine producers and fisherman, to name
a few. The work is a fine cultural study of the social fabric of France and the social
evolution it underwent in 1932. Her story is also testament to how mass unemployment
was a reality for millions. TWE was a form of ‘counsel’ about the contentment
industriousness brings but the story was equally a sober and moral warning about
German refugees and countless others forbidden to work and left without purpose,
indicating a yet to come danger. A chapter titled ‘Refuse’ explains the reality of those
staying in a shelter.
A hell must have started up in their memories when they were laying sleepless or hunted by
dreams in the clean beds of the shelter, nothing but numbers, refuse on the dust-heap of
mankind. More than anybody else I admire them for their patience, and often I wonder why they
do not organise and try to burn the whole world down (TWE 181).
Linke wrote a semi-fictional story Wo ist Fred? [Where is Fred? (1965)]. The
title was inspired when Lilo didn’t find Hans in his bed one morning.72 The story also
borrowed from Ecuadorian myths about hidden treasure in the Andean mountains. Her
only story authored in German, it was published posthumously. Linke wrote with
German youth in mind. WIF is a story about adventure and is a tale of ‘counsel’ calling
for dialog and cooperation between cultures and nations. The protagonist failed because
of his exploit—greed for gold—and consequent mistreatment of Ecuadorians as a
means to an end. It is an allegory of improvident business and dehumanization of Latin
American common man.
Returning to her prologue ‘East Prussia August First 1914’ Linke never forgave
Hindenburg—later learning of the Battle of Tannenberg at school—for the atrocities
committed against her East Prussian childhood friends. Gas was used for the first time
in WWI. In the winter of 1915, Hindenburg’s grim offense against the Russians—
Winter Battle of Masuria—took place (Trumpener 1975: 469 fn 31). Carrying the pain
of their tragic end must have been a heavy burden. The only traumatic narrative to
appear in her entire oeuvre, in the pen of a gruesome folktale, reads as follows:
72
Memoirs of Hans Linke. With permission, Marc Linke, 2013.
111
I saw them wading deeper and deeper into the swampy water, their brains filled with agony.
Green slime swelled up from underneath their feet, covered their ankles, their knees, grasped
towards their hearts; a green death sat grinning on their shoulders. They could not even cry, earth
and water filled their mouths. But their last rattlings frightened the birds and the deer, their
rotting bodies would poison the lakes. Masuria, my fairyland, had been violated, its eternal
summer was gone (RD 12).
In sum, Linke’s spirit of insubordination illustrates how Veblen’s notions were
manifest in her authorship and conception of life, Weltanschauung or Lebensweg, life
way, constituting an emancipatory praxis in the sense Freire offered. Experiencing the
‘New Order’ firsthand, she cultivated her writing to that of ‘matter-of-fact knowledge’
as a counter-narrative to ‘phrase-makers’ from imbecile institutions. A masterless man
(Fig. 6), she dedicated her life to purposeful work for common good across each
geography and culture she journeyed, only when all efforts to bring democracy to
Weimar were exhausted. Kazin thought it probable ‘this trait, this growing celebration
of one’s own powers, can be found among pure scientists as well’ (1964: 215). A
storyteller of social evolution, and her evolution, Linke wrote truthful stories for the
science of life to transform the world. Dirlik thinks, there is nothing wrong with ‘truth
claims’ (2002: 16) when they counteract gross injustices.
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Part II: What Did She Write?
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—Chapter 5—
Empire to Republic
A Journey Across Civilization
Home truth one: True Turkishness means rejoicing in the
infinite plurality of people as we rejoice in the infinite
multiplicity of nature. —Moris Farhi (2007: 431)
[Izmir, Turkey]…I had seen and heard it all before, but
rarely so welded into a whole, so contented and sure of
itself, acknowledging the existence of Europe and yet still
holding out against its influence where it tried to overstep its
boundaries. —Lilo Linke (AD 283)
Might Linke have viewed Turkey sharing a common fate, in other words, equating their
independence—defeat of imperialism—via construction of a modern Republic, as
similar to her struggle to bring democracy to Weimar? Did the Turks reflect Linke’s
‘spirit of insubordination’? To answer these questions we need to know the Turkish
people more intimately. We cannot begin in 1935. Linke takes us on this journey in the
case study that follows. Obliged to consult Ottoman historiography, sociologist Şerif
Mardin suggests Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) should not be left to Western
hegemonic discourse of Orientalists (2008: 4). He rejects Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis of
‘invention of tradition’ and offers the idea ‘we refurbish the concepts that were already
central in our earlier cultures’ (p. 10). This exploration differs from other scholars in my
use of Veblen’s cumulative causation methodology to investigate how ‘native bias’
(conventional wisdom) may help us understand better the evolution from Empire to
Republic. Here, I hope to illustrate the Republic bears some ties with its Ottoman past
but equally these ties were constituted in a constant inter-exchange with the European
polity. If there is a ‘spirit of insubordination’ (instinct of workmanship, parental bent
and idle curiosity) within Turkey, what social formations cultivated this proclivity and
what forces caused this formation to evolve?
Teasing out cultural inheritances from the Ottoman Empire is a risky project.
The empire covers a near millennium of rule. Republican pioneers wanted to make a
sharp break from this past because they set their gaze toward the future not the past.
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Certainly, they had valid reasons for the decision that come to the fore across this
chapter. Impossible to cover the vast periods of cultural evolution in detail, I have
focused on several major periods of rupture and change. My exploration into Ottoman
habituation is neither to inspire a longing for the glorious Ottoman past nor is it a
blueprint for political interests to exploit and benefit certain party regimes. Rather, it is
a good-will attempt to understand what types of ‘psychological inheritance’ form a
‘native-bias’, or what Veblen also termed ‘conventional wisdom’ (1922/1964: 39), that
was passed over to the republic. To approach this, I extract some excerpts from Linke’s
texts—largely found in her chapter end notes—to confirm the authenticity and depth of
her work by juxtaposing it to recent scholarship on the empire and also to ground a
Turkish ‘spirit of insubordination’.
In the central Anatolian city of Sivas, Linke visited the Sky College (Gök
Medrese) built in 1271. Describing mosaic patterns, azure turquoise tiles and
calligraphic scripture she concluded: ‘All these manifold decorations melted into one
impression, that of extreme order’ (AD 26). Her use of the word ‘order’ for Islamic art
is well grounded as an artistic expression of their Weltanschauung. The Ottoman
Empire originated from Central Asian Oğhuz Turks (600-1400 AD) that blossomed out
of the Seljuk Empire (1037-1194). Prior to Islam, the Turkic Oğhuz were pagan and
worshiped a sky-god, a belief called Tengrism, hence the name ‘Sky College’. Halil
İnalcık explains the work titled Kutadgu Bilig (1070) means ‘reason is the pillar of
happiness’. Written by the eleventh century poet-thinker Yusuf Has Hacib it is an ethics
on governance (1993: 8). Hacib proposed that gentleness or forbearance (hilm) and
personal humility is a ‘philosophical system for life’ (p. 2). ‘In everything consult
reason (akl) and knowledge (bilü)’ (p. 8).
Osman beg73 (d. 1326), from whom the empire took its name, was an effective
leader of small beyliks74 on a porous western frontier after the collapse of the Byzantine
Empire. With the conquer of Constantinople in 1453, contrary to assumptions the
empire was an Islamic entity, Ottoman habituation coalesced Tengrism, Islamism,
Sufism, Christianity, Judaism and Aristotelian traditions into what Barkey calls a
‘bricolage of institutions’ (2008: 72). Muslims intermarried with Christians. Simply,
they ‘coopted their enemies’ (p. 65). Through wise resource distribution, they built up
horizontal networks that earned them legitimacy in rule. This is evident in the sixteenth
century work ‘Ethics of Kınalızade’ by the Ottoman Men of Letters. Cemal Kafadar
73
74
Group leader.
Territory under the jurisdiction of a group leader.
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asserts ‘even when they ventured into concrete observations from their own time, [they]
never strayed from the theoretical position elaborated by Aristotle in his Ethics on the
nature of commercial exchange (teamül)—that it is a necessity for human existence and
that it requires fairness in exchange’ (1986: 151 fn 123). Beyond its meaning in
jurisprudence, teamül denotes a way of being, of ‘habitual things and practices’
(alışılagelmiş şeyler) achieved in ethical conduct. For instance, Jews fleeing the Spanish
Inquisition were welcome in the empire. Non-Muslims practiced their religion freely,
providing it not upset the Islamic order (Barkey p. 110). The Janissary (devşirme)
institution selected and converted young, talented Christian boys to Islam where they
were educated at Palace schools (Mekteb-i Enderûn) and placed in top leadership
positions (Başgöz 1968: 1). This privilege ensured loyalty to the state and wedded
Christian polities to the empire. Religious colleges (medrese)75 educated the Islamic
clergy, judges and bureaucrat administrators. The empire was one of order. Pope Pius II
(1405-1464) compared Ottoman Islamic order with the disunity he observed in Europe.
[Christendom] is a body without a head, a republic without laws or magistrates… every state has
a separate prince, and every prince has a separate interest… Who will make the English love the
French? Who will unite the Genoese and the Aragonese? Who will reconcile the Germans with
the Hungarians and Bohemians?... If you lead a small army against the Turks you will easily be
overcome; if a larger one, it will soon fall into confusion (Coles cited in Nişancıoğlu 2013: 148).
Interestingly, the term ‘Turk’ is used synonymously with the Ottoman Empire.
Mardin points out that ‘Turks’ and ‘Turkishness’ was not an ‘invention’ but rather that
‘all state documents [Ottoman Empire] even though full of bowdlerized Arabic-Persian
expressions were not drafted in some kind of pidgin but in a language easily identifiable
as Turkish’ (2008: 11). German linguist Max Müller’s theory on Turanism linked
language groups of Turanic people to Central Asian Ural-Altai language (1855). It is
instructive to recall Veblen postulated that groups united around a ‘community of
language’ (1915/1964: 4). Terms like halk (people), devlet (state), millet (nation), hak
(right as in İnsan Hakları—Human Rights), hukuk (law) and vatan (fatherland)76 were
all pre-exiting concepts used by the Turkish modernizers (Mardin p. 11).
Linke forever rejected nationalism based on her experiences of it in Weimar but
she also understood patriotism was not necessarily an outright evil. ‘Nationalism needs
an adversary. Turkey, however, has no exterior enemy whom she wants to fight’ (AD
148). Of republican pioneers patriotic aims for unity and order, she concluded:
75
76
Medrese curriculum included mathematics, history, medicine, Arabic philology and Islamic law.
Terms are also shared in Persian.
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In other circumstances such unrestrained patriotism and the deification of the head of the state
would have annoyed and repelled me. I have always considered nationalism more a vice than a
virtue. But I understood that in the case of Turkey it had a necessary function. It was needed to
unite a primitive peasant population which for so long had been held together by the person of
the Sultan who was both successor of Osman, and Caliph or “Shadow of Allah on Earth” (AD
148).
Believing patriotism common across humanity, Veblen pointed to its use and abuse.
[T]he patriot may be moved by many and divers other considerations, besides that of the national
prestige; and these other considerations may be of the most genial and reasonable kind, or they
may also be as foolish and mischievous as any comprised in the range of human infirmities. He
may be a humanitarian given over to the kindliest solicitude for the common good, or a religious
devotee hedged about in all his motions by the ever present fear of God, or taken up with artistic,
scholarly or scientific pursuits; or, again, he may be a spendthrift devotee of profane dissipation,
whether in the slums or on the higher levels of gentility, or he may be engaged in a rapacious
quest of gain, as a businessman within the law or as a criminal without its benefit, or he may
spend his best endeavors in advancing the interests of his class at the cost of the nation at large
(1917/1964: 34).
From these various ‘patriotisms’, Linke will show across the case study that perhaps
Turkish patriotism was of the ‘genial and reasonable kind’ of certain ‘solicitude for the
common good’. Contrastingly, Richard Robinson (1951) only saw ‘Atatürk acting with
typical ruthlessness’, who ‘jettisoned the experiment and crushed the very opposition
which he had encouraged’ (p. 427), who ‘seized dictatorial powers’ and ‘forced
reforms’ (p. 426). Perhaps there is some truth in this. Veblen also noted, ‘among the
followers of Islam, devout and resolute, the patriotic statesman (that is to say the
politician who designs to make use of the popular patriotic fervor) will in the last resort
appeal to the claims and injunctions of the faith’ (1917/1964: 35). Did Mustafa Kemal
and his peers practice this form of patriotism?
When in Samsun, an Anatolian city on the Black Sea coast, Linke met the
mayor. She observed: ‘Whilst we went on talking about Samsun and its problems,
people kept coming into the room without so much as knocking at the door, and the
mayor attended to them and their documents—how many documents there were
about!—and turned back to me with an apology. [Linke asked] “Does everything in this
town pass through your hands?” Instead of answering, he reached for an old volume on
his desk and began to read aloud and translate:
His door shall be always open, and consultation with him should be easy. It has been said: If any
person to whom a single affair of the believers is entrusted, shut his door so that the oppressed
and needy cannot reach him, to that man the Gate of Mercy shall be closed in the time of his
great need, and he will be deprived of the universal compassion and perfect kindness of the
Exalted and Lofty Allah (AD 159).
The mayor informed Linke: ‘This is a quotation from an old book on Ottoman
statecraft. Our Republic is secular, but these old principles are still valid—though, of
course, my secretary protects me from the worst. If you ever go to Ankara—and you
117
ought to—you will find the doors equally open there’ (Emphasis added, AD 159). Linke
was also told: ‘We have a different attitude toward religion. More matter-of-fact, more
terre-à-terre [down to earth]. We can smile at things that hurt us’ (AD 228).
In the Empire, patrimonial rule and a tributary mode of production placed
subjects into two classes: ruling elites, the sultan and his administration of bureaucrats
(sipahi), religious officers (ulema), military groups (Janissary and timar) and respective
families; and the masses (reaya) subjects. Historian Mete Tunçay points out the empire
was not a theocracy (1994: 158). For Barkey, the empire was rationally constructed
through diversity, legitimacy, negotiation and resource distribution across a centralized
empire. The glue holding the structure together was an ideological-juridical apparatus
(through judiciary practice) and belief in state-owned land under protection of the
sultan. Judges (kadi) administered dual laws—Sultanic (kanun), Islamic (şeriat),
principle of accommodation (istimalet) for non-Muslims. Judicial appointments were
rotated every three years (Barkey 2008: 95). To dissuade corruption, judges answered
directly to Istanbul. Innovative laws were implemented whereby complaint was
encouraged to protect subjects. A subject could directly go to the top officials in
Istanbul and make a claim against any injustices brought upon him (Barkey 1994: 86).
Only under Selim I (1512-1520), when the empire expanded eastward, did
imperial Istanbul reason that in order to knit the empire together it was necessary to
adopt Sunni Islam as an institutionalized umbrella ideology to evolve from a horizontal
to a vertical network of rule. Although Sunni Islam was practiced in urban centers, rural
subjects were free to follow Sunni and/or heterodox folk Islam, Sufism and Shi’ism.
Rather than divide and rule, they implemented what Barkey calls a ‘hub-and-spoke’
centralized network; a negotiated initiative to ensure the provision of goods and services
between the imperial center (hub) and regional peripheries (spokes) as a ‘state-society
contract’ (2008: 17-18). Within the imperial distributive economy, the hub controlled
production, land, labor and capital under state institutions that also ‘enhanced the
practices and the interests of each side’ (p. 17).
Linke’s discussion with the mayor of Samsun seems to reveal the ‘conventional
wisdom’ of good governance from the past, when he told her: ‘The people’s interests
come first […] Their comfort is more important than the profit of some unscrupulous
individual’ (AD 159). Thus, rather than a doctrine of Islam outright, the secularists
borrowed from ‘Ottoman statecraft’ guided by rationality, negotiation and legitimacy
that borrowed from the former ‘state-society contract’ in Barkey’s understanding of the
term. In the Kutadgu Bilig it was governance based on humility, reason and knowledge.
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Mustafa Kemal’s infamous war slogan during the War of Independence (19191922), ‘the real owner and master of the country is the peasant’ (Başgöz 1968: 134) was
not base jingoism. I propose it derived from ‘native bias’ found in the family farm
institution. The main distributive institution of the empire was the peasant family farm
(çift-hane)77 to meet agricultural production. The state gave peasant families two oxen
and tools needed to operate their individual farm, leaving them largely self-reliant
(Barkey 2008: 108; Keyder 1983a). Peasants were not serfs. Keyder makes this clear.
The Ottoman Empire was not feudal: the nature of the state, its role in the determination of the
class structure, in social reproduction and in that class structure itself was fundamentally
different from the pre-capitalist order we have come to know as European feudalism (1987: 7).
Barkey agrees. ‘Except for harvesting and taxation times, peasants and landholders had
little interaction. A complete image of the English or French lord’s manor life—is
missing’ (1994: 93). Linke noticed in 1935 the ‘absence of a bourgeoisie in our
European sense’ (SCT 550). In the empire no accumulation of land was permitted.
Surplus was delivered to the state as a form of tax payment and the peasant lived off the
remainder. Provisions were redistributed across the empire to supply the urban centers.
The family farm unit (çift-hane) was part of a larger division of labor in the land-tenure
system (timar). A state bureaucrat (sipahi) was granted land-tenure and was responsible
to ensure surplus from the land, to collect state tax (öşr) from peasants and a quota of
soldiers (askeri) for military campaigns. A bureaucratic layer reproducing core state
ideology across the empire, state bureaucrat posts rotated every three years. To my
mind, excluding the elite and farm-units, Ottoman habituation might be envisioned a
kind of pre-set dance floor where state actors (bureaucrats, judges, clergy)—like
dancers—continuously switched partners, as their appointments rotated from polity to
polity. Although a fixed structure, subjects were in perpetual renewal; a series of
departures and arrivals that reproduced adaptability, fluidity, sociability and new
learning. Linke will note in the case study that well-educated students were happy to be
posted ‘wherever we are needed’ in the Republic (AD 149)—‘conventional wisdom’.
Barkey points to the distributive system across the empire, which we will see
further along in the chapter, appears to surface again during the Étatist period. Imperial
Istanbul supervised internal and external trade, raw material allocation, the flow and
quantity-quality of goods across peripheries and kept trade routes and markets
accessible and serviced to enhance state wealth. Urban craftsmen and tradesmen guilds
77
The term literally translated means a coupled household.
119
(esnaf) were granted special privileges and were responsible to increase Ottoman
wealth. When necessary, imports were controlled to protect guilds. Manufacture was
regulated to supply lucrative intra-regional and external trade along north-south and
east-west trade routes. Manufactured goods including cloth, fine silks from Bursa, rare
prized Angora goat hair,78 wools, leather, food produce, spices and commodities like
silver and wheat were traded from India to Europe and Russia to the Maghreb.
Merchants, as interlocutors between Europe and the empire, secured new markets and
trade, establishing trade colonies under Ottoman protection in Venice, Ancona and Lviv
(İnalcık and Quateart 1994: 189).
Another distributive institution and ‘Ottoman innovation’ (Singer 2005: 493)
was the urban hospice-kitchens (imaret), numbering over one hundred from Jerusalem
to the Balkans. The practice originated in the Turco-Mongol tradition established in
İznik and Bursa in the 1330s (p. 494). From the thirteenth to nineteenth century the
purpose-built hospice-kitchen was ‘a nexus of patronage, charity and hospitality’ and
did not appear in any other Islamic society (p. 481). Clients, visiting dignitaries,
travelers, traders, merchants, religious leaders, scholars, students, families, those
working in other institutions and indigents, were welcome. Kafadar notes: ‘The
redistributive process becomes progressively more elaborate as the state’s wealth
grows’ (1986: 30). The institution reproduced an ethos for betterment of the whole and
habituation to teamül fairness in exchange. In Veblenian terms, we might equate these
institutions with maintaining ‘common good’ through ethical and rational governance.
Fernand Braudel wrote of the Ottoman Empire: ‘It all seems curiously modern’
(1995: 91). Ernest Gellner, writing of the ‘terrible Turks’, admits the Ottoman Empire
‘was stable, strong and long-lived’ and a ‘political system of great authority which was
not based on the cohesion of a pre-existent tribal group, but on the contrary relied on a
conspicuously non-tribal elite’ (1981: 73). Lord Palmerston, the British foreign
secretary to the Ottoman Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, was annoyed with
Muhammad Ali—a rebel from the empire who declared himself the Khedive of Egypt—
because his governance was a kind of ‘simple State Socialism’ (Ridley 1970: 210).
Certainly, subjects in Ottoman habituation were not equal, as special privileges existed
between the Imperial hub and peripheries, as well as between religions, ethnicities,
armies, merchants, tradesman, guilds, bureaucrats and peasants. Institutions did provide
for a measure of ‘common good’ and for a unified and well-governed empire. Linke
78
Anatolian towns Ankara, Beypazar and Tokat supplied highly sought fleece from Angora goats,
indigenous to these regions and held a monopoly on them from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries.
120
intuited the Republic was a ‘capitalism of civil servants’ (SCT 551).
How might Veblenian analysis interpret the empire? In some ways, ‘Live and
Let Live’ habituation is commensurate with some institutions in the empire. Veblen
pointed out the self-reliance of peasants engaged in ‘anarchistic systems of manual
labour’ (1915/1964: 325) that allows one to ‘do his work in his own way’ whereby ‘he
will not transgress the margin of tolerance rooted in the moral common sense of his
neighbors’ (p. 329). İnalcık and Russian agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov
suggest that the family farm unit (çift-hane) comprised the ‘natural economy’ in Russia
and the Ottoman Empire (İnalcık and Quateart 1994: 143). An ‘economically efficient
system’ it did not seek to produce surplus value beyond family needs (Chayanov 1991:
91). In this sense, the Ottoman peasantry, structured on self-reliant production units,
were habituated to ‘Live and Let Live’. More importantly, there was no private
ownership at this stage in the Empire. Veblen equated private property with the rise of
the institution of ‘pecuniary emulation’ and ‘invidious comparison’—the needless habit
to compare ones wealth with that of another (1899/2009: 23). There is little fetishism of
property as with the bourgeoisie in Europe. The sultan was perceived the sole provider
of land tenure, technology, markets, appointments, protection and security. It was in all
the subjects’ best interests that the imperial system function. Fairness of exchange
(teamül) was the ‘spirit’ that united the empire through diversity, trade, manufacture,
law, education and resource distribution to procure a ‘Live and Let Live’ ethos. Was
this the ‘oriental despotism’ Karl Wittfogel referred to in his magnum opus on the
subject in 1957?
This ‘native-bias’ still existed in 1935, when Linke experienced the centuriesold habit of bartering, noting ‘both parties have or will acquire a personal relationship to
the piece in question, it is no meanness of character which drives them to bargain, but
the desire to compare almost abstract values’ (AD 25). Linke espoused these ‘abstract
values’ were not about the price but more about friendship.
The Classical Era of Ottoman trade and production with the Genoese and
Venetians (European middlemen) faced external challenges when the Holy League
(1571) united Catholic maritime states and attempted to break the Ottoman monopoly.
Scholars attribute the European economic crisis of the early seventeenth century to the
influx of silver from Latin America and the vibrant Atlantic economy (Kafadar 1986:
138). The economic crisis triggered the Thirty Years War (1618-48). Craftsmen fled
from the Continent to England and were transmitters of Asian-Anatolian manufacturing
techniques, becoming an early catalyst for British industrial development (Gekas 2007:
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13). Ömer Lütfi Barkan notes ‘wheat, copper, wool, and the like’ were ‘sucked out of
Ottoman markets’ (Barkan cited in Kafadar p. 138 fn 93). This economic upset was
about to evolve the empire in another direction. Faced with internal and external
challenges the Ottomans sought alternatives for trade by granting the French (1569),
British (1583) and Dutch (1612) capitulations or ‘pledges of friendship’ as a means to
secure ‘political advantages’ (İnalcık 1994: 189). Braudel noted the result.
[A]fter 1570 the Mediterranean world was harassed, bullied, and pillaged by northern ships and
merchants, and that these merchants did not make their initial fortune in the India companies or
in risky ventures on the Seven Seas. They fell upon the wealth present around the Mediterranean
and seized it in any way they could, respectable or disreputable. They flooded the area with
clever imitations of the excellent southern textiles and even marked them with the universally
reputed Venetian seals in order to sell them under that “label” on the usual Venetian markets. As
a result, Mediterranean industry lost both its clientele and its reputation (1977: 88).
In 1591, the British sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to source raw materials from
India. Sea-routes gradually replaced overland caravans for this function (Keyder 1983b:
58). British merchants flooded the empire with cheap textiles. French and Dutch
merchants penetrated the lucrative silk trade in Damascus. Forbidden in Ottoman
capitulations, the empire was flooded with ‘counterfeit coins imported chiefly by the
Dutch’ (İnalcık 1994: 375). From then on, the empire became increasingly entangled in
defensive wars to protect territories and trade routes that altered and evolved Ottoman
habituation.
Keyder (1983a), Kasaba (1987) and Wallerstein (1989) argue the Ottoman
Empire was ‘incorporated’ into the world-system while Ottoman scholars (İnalcık and
Quataert 1994; Barkey 2008) argue the empire adapted and recovered. Skeptical of
‘decline’ theories Barkey believes:
In employing this term “decline” and in locating Ottoman decline in the sixteenth century,
scholars have contributed to the pernicious comparison of Western rise and development as
opposed to Islamic decline. If Ottoman society was in decline, then its social, political, and
cultural production was deemed in the negative, a lesser and wanting polity that would end up
imitating the West (p. 22).
Faced with these challenges, the Ottomans gradually liberalized tax-farming by
evolving the land tenure institution (timarot) and modernizing the military. Elites did
not overthrow the state, as in Europe, but sought ways to be re-incorporated. Imperial
Istanbul (hub) created regional policies, pitting elites against one another, rather than
against the state. Bureaucrats (sipahi) were replaced with irregular upstart peasant
soldiers (sekban). Alongside the Janissaries (Barkey 1994: 69-70),79 officials
79
Janissary corps grew from 8,000 (1527) to over 50,000 (1669) to fight foreign wars.
122
encouraged sekban—small groups of irregular armies—to serve multiple purposes.
These ‘armed bandits’ forced timar sipahi off the land, conducted extortion campaigns,
forcefully collected tax and raided villages (p. 153). Governors (sancakbeyi) and
governor-general (beylerbeyi) received grants to ‘keep the provinces dependent on and
cooperative with the center’ (p. 77). Rivalry for state appointments kept regional
administrators in perpetual competition. Tax was collected, prices were fixed (narh)
(Kafadar p. 130), provinces swore loyalty to the core, well-trained provincial armies
swelled and tax-farming blossomed. Consenting to dissent, Istanbul met its objectives
and maintained control in an empire that had outgrown the sultan. Normally, ‘not a
strongly demarcated class society’ social inequalities fomented rebellion (Barkey 2008:
214). When the European economic crisis spilled into the empire, the Ottoman currency
(akçe) became valueless (hurde) (Kafadar p. 75). Janissaries went unpaid and when
artisans joined them, a revolt took place known as the Beylerbeyi Incident (1589) (p.
43). Celali rebellions (1596-1610) sparked across Anatolia. The dispossessed flocked to
urban cites, overwhelming the infrastructure.
Coined the Tulip Period (Lale Devri) (1718-1730), inspired by the cultivation of
magnificent tulip gardens, Ottoman elites opened up to the west and contemplated
Ottoman values while emulating (perceived superior) lavish European lifestyles.
Display of wealth aggravated the poor and destitute in Istanbul. Elites encouraged
consumption of foreign luxury goods. Some sixty years prior to the French Revolution,
angry crowds attacked the Imperial palace in Istanbul in the central district of Beşiktaş
in 1726 (Barkey 2008: 215 fn 36). The leader of the rebellion Patrona Halil—ex-soldier
and petty trader artisan—gathered ‘artisans, petty bourgeoisie, small-scale merchants
allied with religious students, ulema leaders and Janissary men’ determined ‘to stop the
regime that robbed them of their daily living’ (p. 213). They burned their way to the
palace, demanding the execution of the Grand Vizier but did not threaten the sultan (p.
216). The revolt caused reform and reconstituted a ‘moral economy’ (p. 217). Onerous
taxes were repealed and the Beşiktaş palace was torn down. A rim had been formed
around the hub-and-spoke.
Despite dissidence, adaptability and empowerment through the agency of
multiple and diverse social groups, evolved empire rule into ‘modern state rule’ (p.
227). In the countryside, ‘multiple networks’ reorganized on communal lines, developed
community agriculture, water supplies, roads, bridges and schools, local employment
and trade investment, for betterment of the regional community as they had learned
from the earlier practices of imperial governance (p. 244). This is instructive, indeed,
123
because we will see in the case study that some of these ‘communal’ formations occur
again in the Republic. These notables filled the gaps in state provisions and services and
became the ‘modern architects of Turkey’ (p. 262). These networks conducted direct
trade with Europe. Trade flourished. But the once ‘appointed’ merchants, acting as
interlocutors between Europe and the Empire, meant ‘Ottoman Muslim and nonMuslim merchants, landholders, peasants, and notables now encountered not only the
vagaries of the international market and the difficulties of a provisionist state, but also
the increasingly negative, imposing, and demeaning language and discourse of the
Europeans’ (p. 242).
External challenges forced the Ottomans to remilitarize in order to defend the
empire. This learned habit of self-defense to continuously protect Ottoman territory
against foreign intervention evolved, it can be said, into a ‘psychological inheritance’ or
‘native bias’ whereby empire subjects—acting on behalf of the empire—learned to react
with a certain defensiveness against adverse stimuli. Simply, we might call it ‘jumping
to conclusions or suspicions’, sometimes founded and sometimes not. This learned habit
caused a drift away from teamül. Ottoman students were educated in Europe to learn
military science. In the nineteenth century, the empire founded its own military
academies. The military became embedded in state power. Linke commented: ‘If
therefore today a great number of former generals and officers hold high positions in the
Republic as members of the government, valis, deputies, and so on, it is not so much a
sign of a military dictatorship ruling over the country, as an outcome of this earlier
politisation of the army which brought about a passionate belief in reform’ (AD 72).
The military, bureaucrats, pashas, viziers, religious leaders (ulema), notables
(ayan), even women, purchased life-term revenue farms (malikhane), thus forging fiscal
relations between Istanbul and the peripheries. In the eastern peripheries of Damascus,
Aleppo, Diyarbakır, Mardin and Adana notables were awarded contracts (Barkey 2008:
234). Keyder suggests that even in the twentieth century western Turkey had an
independent peasantry while the southeast peasantry was bound to exploitative
landlords (ağas), resistant to relinquishing land to the state (1983b: 62). Additionally,
Armenian, Greek and Jewish moneylenders collaborated with state bureaucrats to
provide capital for these land purchases. Aware of some stigma toward them she wrote:
The Turks generally did not interfere with the religion of their subject races. The Armenians,
believing in a Catholicism of their own, might have lived peacefully among the Moslem
majority if they had not attracted their destructive hatred for special reasons. They developed a
special aptitude for banking and trade and thus became the Jews of Turkey, like them accused by
their debtors of unscrupulous hardheartedness (AD 84).
124
If this is true, it was based on experience of the interaction with these actors and their
European counterparts. For instance, in signing the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774)
with Russia, when the Ottomans lost Crimea, Russian merchants fomented unrest.
‘[E]ven though the majority of the merchant class of Trabzon had been Muslims, with
Russian commerce and European intrusion, Greek merchants displaced Muslims and
acquired a dominant trading position. Shifts of this sort occurred in many other centers’
(Barkey 2008: 285). It is misleading to assume that all Greeks, Jews and Armenians
engaged in trade and banking, as some were also artisans.
The nineteenth century saw a shift away from negotiations, diversity and
legitimacy toward standardized rules and regulations (p. 26). The Young Ottomans were
embroiled in fierce rivalry between French, Russian and British imperialist expansion.
Acceleration of capital accumulation and movement of people and goods initiated new
knowledge, diverse grievances and national consciousness. Emergent Western
Anatolian notables—now a fully landed class in their own right—accumulated wealth
from cotton and maize çiftliks during the late eighteenth century boom (Kasaba 1987:
824). They demanded more state-owned land (vakif) held under religious privileges of
the ulema class. These inter-competing foreign and local actors vied for concessions,
just as state coffers depleted, leaving over-taxed peasants and the poor to foot the bill.
The Sened-i İttifak ‘deed of agreement’ (1808) was negotiated and signed between the
State and coalition of powerful Anatolian families, the first of its kind in the empire
(Barkey 2008: 205). The Ottoman central government (Sublime Porte) signed a series of
treaties to gain much-needed access to international markets (Kasaba 1993: 220). Under
pressure to suppress a revolt in Egypt, the Ottomans signed the Balta Limanı Treaty
(1838)—a bilateral free-trade agreement—the most liberal of the time according to Lord
Palmerston (Wallerstein 1989: 177). The last vestiges of Ottoman teamül habit were
incommensurate with foreign exploitation. Perhaps the Ottomans read treaties too
literally, in that, they stipulated equal privileges to European and Ottoman interests
(Kasaba 1993: 218). The Ottomans became habituated to foreign enterprise operating
directly on their soil all the while these foreign actors were set on undermining
Anatolian networks. This was not ‘Live and Let Live’ by any means.
The Ottomans entered the Tanzimat Era (1839-1876) literally ‘reorganization’
period. Mardin notes a schism in world-views amongst Ottoman intellectuals at the
time; some desired a return to the Ottoman-Islamic golden age of the ‘good’ state
(2000: 197) while others wanted modernization including in military science (p. 20203). Statesmen-diplomat Reşid Pasha—architect of the Tanzimat—drafted a semi125
constitutional charter Hatt-ı Hümâyun (1839) for an Ottoman nation whereby all
subjects would benefit from identical civil rights, not dependent on religious affiliation
(p. 14). The edict drew the attention of foreign actors towards the treatment of
Christians. When reforms made Ottoman subjects equal, Christian privileges with
respect to community service were suspended. Christian groups, in need of
employment, faced a debt-burdened Muslim populace seeking similar posts in state
institutions (p. 18). Foreign interest in Christian welfare was superficial. Linke clarified
this for her reader. ‘The foreign powers, ready to interfere in order further to weaken
Turkey, sided with the Armenians under the pretext of shielding Christian minorities’
(AD 84). They used Christian grievances as a bargaining tool to gain privileges from the
state. Thus foreign intervention influenced the discourse on Ottoman statecraft. The
Porte’s international relations, under the concert of Europe only brought confusion
(Mardin 2000: 16).
For instance, an 1856 Rescript granted legal rights to Ottoman minorities for
Western-style education (Göçek 1993: 522). Foreign education institutes were allowed
to teach in their respective language and ‘train their coreligionist’. US Protestant
missionaries, Austrian and Italian Catholics, Russians and Greeks, opened foreign
schools (p. 523). Jewish schools practiced an integrationist policy ‘aimed to educate,
civilize, and regenerate the community’ (p. 532). Despite receiving the same education,
Göçek believes Western powers ‘fostered an ideology of separateness’ through ‘ethnic
segmentation’ (p. 531).
[T]he Young Ottomans and Young Turks, who were trained in the Western-style educational
system of the Ottoman state, launched political movements. Due to differing cultural
interpretations, the political outcome of the first group’s efforts took the form of independence
movements, while the second group changed Ottoman political rule by deposing the sultan (p.
507).
While Göçek’s assertion is not unfounded, considering Ottoman habituation in
diversity, it might be argued, a schism in education already existed. For example, nongovernmental salons like the Beşiktaş Scientific Society (Mardin 2000: 229) were rich
with Ottoman and Western intellectual collaboration. When American educator George
Washburn met Vekif Paşa, a Young Ottoman, he was startled by the latter’s knowledge
of Western thought. A secretary at the British Embassy found the level of conversation
with Ottoman colleagues surprising. ‘We read together the best English classics—
amongst them the works of Gibbon, Robertson and Hume—and studied political
economy in those of Adam Smith and Ricardo’ (p. 209). Decades later, Mary Mills
Patrick, an American teacher at the Istanbul Women’s College between 1871 and 1924,
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remarked that her ‘students were in some ways abnormally clever […] It seems amazing
to me now that such intelligent classes could have been possible after such a short
history of the new school’ (Patrick 1934: 38). Her students, Bulgarians, Turks,
Russians, Armenians and Kurds became doctors, bankers and lawyers. Halidé Edip
Adivar, who we meet in the case study, was one of her students.
Print capitalism was a catalyst for nationalist ideas and Ottoman self-perception,
locally and internationally. The Ottoman Empire was constructed as the ‘Sick Man of
Europe’80 in the international press, propagating a sense of ‘inferiority’ in the Ottomans.
Concerned about the way the empire was headed, Young Ottoman intellectuals81 well
versed on international affairs and working as translators in the Sublime Porte
Translation Bureau, formed the Patriotic Alliance (İttifak-i Hammiyet) in 1865 to form
an Ottoman nation along Islamic lines (Mardin 2000: 20-21). Exiled to Paris in 1868,
they regrouped as the Young Ottoman Society (p. 44).
Allied with Britain and France, the Ottomans entered the Crimean War (185356) although not everyone in Istanbul wanted to go to war (Mardin 2000: 205). Linke
also commented on these earlier adverse relations with Tsarist Russia.
For centuries Russia and Turkey had been at daggers drawn. The Tsars had always longed to
conquer Constantinople in order to gain control over the Straits of the Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles as an outlet to the Mediterranean. Gradually, but steadily, they encroached upon the
Turkish territory, making their final effort in the Great War (AD 85).
The Ottomans acquired their first European loan to fund the war effort (Birdal 2010:
26). Later to default on interest payments, they turned to Jewish, Greek, Armenian and
Levantine bankers—Galata Bankers or ‘Galata Vampires’ as they were known in
Europe. ‘Hence, the beneficiaries of the growing financial instability and uncertainty in
the Empire’, states Birdal ‘were the Galata Bankers and their collaborators in the
bureaucracy’ (p. 25). It reignited contention from the Turks against these groups. An
Anglo-Greek consortium founded the National Bank of Turkey (1859) and the AngloFrench Banque Impériale Ottomane (1863) (p. 32). The global economic depression of
the 1870s, forced an overburdened Empire into bankruptcy (p. 54).82 Ironically, this
coincided with the first Ottoman Constitution (1876), drafted by the Young Ottomans,
which was to be suspended in 1878. Sultan Abdülaziz was ousted by a military coup.
80
Tsar Nicholas I, conversing with British ambassador Sir George Hamilton Seymour, coined the term in
January 1853.
81
Young Ottomans were interpreters working in the Porte and well versed on international affairs. They
included Mehmed Bey educated at the Ottoman school in Paris, Nuri Bey, Reşad Bey, poet Namık
Kemal Bey, Ayetullah Bey well exposed to Eastern and Western scholars, and a publisher Refik Bey.
82
Debt defaults reached £252,801,885.
127
The General who led the coup admitted it was ‘the despair he felt at the Ottoman
Empire’s ever catching up with the West that made him rebel’ (Mardin 2000: 216).
Prior to Ottoman bankruptcy, the government established their first tobacco
monopoly İdare-i İnhisarıyeyi Duhan (1873) (Birdal p. 130-31). Working on a
banderole system, it incorporated a plethora of small-scale tobacco farmers into
production. However, the monopoly was to be short lived. In order to repay Ottoman
debt, the British and French founded the Ottoman Public Debt Association (OPDA).
The Decree of Muharrem (1881) accelerated foreign direct investment vis-à-vis the
OPDA, an ‘outpost of European Imperialism’ (p. 126) that sucked all Ottoman potential
state wealth out of the empire. The decree stipulated,
revenue from the salt and tobacco monopolies, the stamp and spirits taxes, the fish tax, and the
silk tithe in certain districts as well as the Bulgaria tribute, the revenue from Eastern Rumelia
and the surplus of the Cyprus revenue were irrevocably ceded to the OPDA, until the debt was
liquidated (p. 54).
The OPDA outsourced Ottoman tobacco production to the French monopoly Régie and
small producers were cut out of the enterprise putting thousands out of work (p. 138).
Thanks to Russian socialist Parvus Efendi,83 parasitic practices of the French Régie
Company (1883) and OPDA were exposed in the nationalist Türk Yurdu journal (19101914) (p. 7). In an attempt to suppress smugglers, Régie hired surveillance guardians
(kolcus) for crops, warehouses and export docks (p. 139). Illegal tobacco crops were
burnt (p. 164-65). Fearing reprisals, Régie increased profit shares to the Porte (p. 163)
threatening to sever international markets should they revoke the concession. Lowwaged non-Muslim women worked in Régie factories. Régie’s kolcus swelled forming
an irregular army84 brutalizing the populace.85 Hundreds of cases were brought before
the courts and judges often sympathized with smugglers. Turning a blind eye, foreign
entrepreneurs acted like a ‘government within the government’ (p. 150). In this manner,
the Ottomans learned double-digit bookkeeping and European business management (p.
174). Here, Wittfogel’s ‘oriental despotism’ seems to make more sense.
Ottomans granted the Germans concessions (1888), making their late entrance
into the empire, ironically, advantageous. ‘The new German state was regarded with
sympathy and hope by the Ottoman Sultan’ (Keyder 1987: 55-56). The Kaiser
announced he was the ‘closest friend of the 300 million Moslems in the world, and their
83
Alexander Parvus Helphand, a Russian socialist and comrade to Leon Trotsky, coined the term
‘continuous revolution’. Exiled to Siberia in 1905 for his involvement in the revolution, Parvus later
lived in the Ottoman Empire. Apparently he became wealthy through arms sales.
84
Kolcu grew from 3,617 in 1886 to 6,500 in 1895 (Birdal p. 148).
85
Between 1884-1908, 20,000 smugglers, some estimate as high as 60,000 were killed (Birdal, p. 139).
128
Caliph, the Sultan’ (p. 56). The Germans viewed Ottoman geographical proximity,
resources and low population, suitable for their own long-term plans to use Anatolia as
a supplier of raw materials for German industry (p. 56).
Expanding portfolios of the British and French invested in railway construction
across the empire. The Germans also laid railways, which would become, according to
Gustav Stolper a main catalyst for WWI. ‘The Berlin Government crossed the path of
England when it offered, with the military, their economic aid to Turkey in Asia and
began to lay out a railroad system in Asia Minor’ (1942: 201). This would validate
Lenin’s thesis on rivaling imperialisms (1917/1996). Unable to invest in the railway due
to debt repayment, to cover cost of the railways seen as ‘economic progress’, the
Ottoman government granted ‘a variety of ancillary rights to the railway companies,
such as the ownership of any mineral deposits, including oil, that could be found within
20 kilometers on either side of the Baghdad railway line from Konya to the Iraqi
provinces’ (Birdal p. 97). Labor to lay the lines utilized both foreign and local
manpower, paying better salaries to European workers and generating ‘inferiority’ in
the local workforce. Ironically, as tracks were laid to unite the Ottoman Empire,
secessionist provinces shrunk the territory.
Anatolia engaged in struggle to retain their spirit of subordination, evidently
curtailed by European business and the Ottoman monarchy, not such unusual
bedfellows. The British purchased large tracts of coastal land in western Anatolia—
assumed sites for serfs and plantations—but Anatolians reverted to various forms of
sabotage, like refusing to work, disobeying orders and using pragmatic tactics to dodge
rules. Merchants used different national flags to export goods, while locals resorted to
banditry, kidnapping foreign officials, burning crops, smashing textile machines,
striking in ports, attacking merchants and demonstrations by miners and tobacco
workers (Kasaba 1993: 232). British and French contradictory foreign trade policy, not
its incompatibility, roused the masses (p. 230). Regional peripheralization, Wallerstein
argued, used the post enlightenment Euro-intellectual idea of ‘oriental despotism’ that
assumed once a despotic ruler was deposed, the masses lacking autonomous social
networks would be too disorganized to unite and would succumb to the core (1989:
238). What the Europeans didn’t realize was that the Ottomans had already rebuilt their
networks a century prior. ‘Multiple networks’ were alive with diverse actors. ‘The
fluidity and multiplicity of their occupations, their diverse origins, and their varying
relationships with the state make it impossible to group them as a class’ (Barkey 2008:
244). Much to the surprise of the British, Anatolia was not India.
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The Young Turks
Central to national struggle was the influence of Balkan and Russian immigrants
more attuned to national and socialist ideologies and active in political, economic and
social spheres, than the people in the eastern peripheries (Tunçay 1994: 164). Salonika
was an entrepôt a swathe with revolutionary and nationalist ideas. Mustafa Kemal was
born in Salonika and prominent members of the Left were Balkan dönme;86 journalist
Sabiha Sertel Zekeriya, poet Nazım Hikmet and Turkish Communist Party leader Şefik
Hüsnü (p. 164). Socialism was tainted with ethnic chauvinist tendencies, such that
socialist groups tended to act independently over a unified Ottoman socialist movement
(p. 163). Ethnic progressives preferred socialism. Ethnic conservatives preferred
national independence. Socialist ideas spread across Anatolia in Greek and Armenian
circles. Illustrated earlier, non-Muslims were viewed ‘suspect’ due to historical external
challenges and accused of weakening the state (p. 160). It didn’t help matters that the
Socialist Internationale endorsed the ‘right to self-determination’ as the treatise merely
exacerbated notions of further empire dissolution (p. 163). Obstacles to a unified
socialist movement were hampered by the ‘psychological traits inherited from the
Hamidian period’ (p. 145). Socialism clashed with nationalism (p. 168).
The Young Turks—as they were known in Europe—comprised civilian and
military secret societies that united as the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress).
Drafting a program to synthesize diverse demands, end absolutist domination and
challenge ulema class privileges over state affairs their goal was to establish a secular
nation with rational and legal institutions regardless of ethnicity or religion. The Young
Turks were to be found in the commercial bourgeoisie, landowner, civil servant,
military cadet and urban working class groups. Economic boycotts against foreign
imports and strikes erupted across the empire as a political weapon (Çetinkaya 2014:
40). Not only those fueled by Muslim resentment but all fed-up with the tyranny of
Sultan Abdulhamid (1876-1909) united in action (p. 25). In July 1908, the Young Turks
aimed to oust the sultan and formed a representative government.
The almost bloodless revolution of the Young Turks had “Ottomanism” as password and
“Liberty, Equality, Justice” as motto. Their objectives were the rescue and modernization of the
Ottoman Empire. Within a few months Istanbul was to be “the freest city in the world”.
Photographs captured for eternity the enthusiasm and fraternization of the various communities.
Thousands of outlaws living abroad came rushing back, from Europe, Russia, Egypt and Iran
(Tunçay 1994: 138).
Young Turks organized irregulars and after a summer of protest, the Sultan feared for
86
Jews converted to Islam.
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his life. Pre-empting the Young Turks, the sultan saved his position by reinstating the
1876 Constitution. The CUP continued to consolidate groups of socialist, nationalist
and liberalist color against the ulema, still a legitimate power with a majority. The
Young Turks were not yet able to confront the sultan’s military, until post WWI.
On the eve of WWI, the CUP aligned with the Central Powers (p. 58). The
Germans interest in the Middle East and the Turks in Central Asia inspired eastward
expansion. Foolish attempts to regain eastern territory soon found the Ottomans
entangled in messy struggles on the eastern frontier. Subordinate to German military,
the CUP collaborated with their war campaign strategies, to the detriment of Armenians
and the Turkish army alike. Bülent Gökay (1997) suggests that the CUP was caught
between British imperialism and Russian Bolshevism. Ethnicities and religions were
used in war strategies. The Entente stirred up southwest Russia, (1) to distract Central
Powers on the eastern front, believing the western front would be easier defeated and
(2) to keep Bolshevik Russia, who signed a peace treaty with the Germans, in the war.
British military attaché in Petrograd, General Alfred Knox established a ‘South Eastern
Union’ using Ural and Dagestan Cossack units. Lloyd George commented on Knox’s
‘Cossack initiative’.
With the help of the Cossacks, the Georgians and Armenians could be reinforced against the
Turks at the Caucasian front. […] These Christian forces of the South, if organized, could
occupy the Donets Basin and thus keep the German and Turkish forces from getting coal, iron,
or oil from Russia or grain from Siberia (Lloyd George, citied in Gökay p. 11-12).
Entrance into WWI was an opportunity to end OPDA capitulations. War did not
end in 1918 for the Young Turks. A battered Anatolia had lost her artisans and Greek
and Armenian bourgeoisie. A series of population exchanges would take place after the
war. Anatolia had to face the fight of her life. At this conjuncture, then U.S. President
Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ conspicuously emerged, of which the twelfth point
stipulated, Turkey’s ‘secured sovereignty’. Peace deals made by the Big Four87 in Paris
1919 had intentions to carve up the spoils of Anatolia between the imperialists. The
Young Turks seized upon this ambiguity in a struggle for national independence.
The Young Turks, following their predecessor Young Ottomans were equipped
with a blueprint for the modern Republic, largely carried out by Mustafa Kemal. Ziya
Gökalp (1876-1924), the ‘real founder of Turkish sociology’ (Berkes 1936: 242),
studied in Paris and was influenced by positivism. The first chair in sociology was
created for Gökalp at the Ottoman university Darülfünun (Istanbul University) in
87
The United States, Britain, France and Italy.
131
1912.88 Much of his work drew from Durkheim’s Les Règles de la Méthode
Sociologique (1895) but rather than mere translation, using some of the terminology, he
reworked the treatise into a ‘native product’ commensurate with what he termed
Ottoman ‘civilization’ and Turkish ‘culture’. Gökalp shirked Tanzimat aims to
amalgamate East and West (1959: 276). Cosmopolitanism in Istanbul revolted him as
books, posters and signs in Arabic, Persian, French and English reinforced the
dichotomy of the Ottoman political structure: dual courts, dual schools, dual taxes, dual
budgets and dual laws. A pragmatist at heart, he blamed the Tanzimatists as
Europeanized elites. ‘[L]ike flowers raised in hot-houses’ they merely emulate all things
foreign (p. 262). He wrote of Anatolian culture: ‘Everything among the people, their
way of clothing, their spirit of surrender and quietness, their unpretentious heroism, in
short, their whole life, is original’ (p. 263). Gökalp reasoned Turkey could be Western
and a modern civilization (çağdaş uygarlık). In his words:
There is only one road to salvation: To advance in order to reach—that is, in order to be equal
to—Europeans in the sciences and industry as well as in military and judicial institutions. And
there is only one means to achieve this: to adapt ourselves to Western civilization completely (p.
276)!
Agitating for ‘national rights’ the Young Turks laid the basis for armed struggle
(Zürcher 1991: 11). In March 1919, the Young Turks lost an election to the pro-entente
monarchist Freedom and Understanding Party. Following the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres,
imperialists partitioned Anatolia. The treaty stipulated, eastern Anatolia become an
independent Armenia, southeast Anatolia become a Kurdish state, the French remain in
Adana province, the Greeks rule Thrace and western Anatolia, Istanbul and the
Bosporus remain free zones and central Anatolia be ruled by the Turks (Başgöz 1968:
32-33). Groups of armed resistance, organized by Turkish and Kurdish notables,
merchants and landowners, inclusive of women fighters, set a national independence
movement in motion.
This sparked three struggles within the struggle. First, the anti-colonial national
independence struggle defended the ‘motherland’ against imperialism. Second, a
struggle between propertied notable classes along ethnic and religious lines ensued.
Third, a fight between the Ottoman ‘imperial’ government in Istanbul over the ‘national
forces’ of the newly established Grand National Assembly (1920) in Ankara arose.
Mustafa Kemal and his cadre of men and women alike, while cannon fire could be
heard in the distance from the advancing Greek army toward the city (p. 34), founded
88
In 1919 Gökalp was arrested by the Allied forces and exiled to Malta as a political prisoner.
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the Ministry of Education on 2 May 1920 (p. 37). There was no education budget.
Teachers went unpaid. Books had to be smuggled from Istanbul to Ankara (p. 43).
The first national Constitution was written to safeguard the people and protect
their national rights. A deputy clarified their circumstances. ‘Eighty per cent of the
population consists of villagers. They are poor, starving, sick and uneducated. They are
subjugated by their religious and tribal leaders and by their local landlords’ (p. 37 fn 6).
As the cadre saw it, the Republic faced two external threats: European imperialism
(western ideal) and communist Russia (eastern ideal). The Grand National Assembly
populist program stated:
The experiments in political democracy which have been undertaken since the Tanzimat reforms
have not offered this class anything and have not improved their lot in any way. It is not possible
to gain representation in the Assembly for the peasants and artisans who have carried the nation
on their shoulders simply by the forms of parliamentary democracy and free elections (p. 37 fn
6).
Mustafa Kemal and his peers were adamant about a ‘third way’ (üçüncü yol) to ‘steer a
course between both communism and political democracy’ (p. 36). The Turkish
Republic was to be freed of social, economic, ethnic and cultural cleavages and instead
bound to national unity. Tanzimat ‘experiments in political democracy’ remained a
bitter Ottoman experience. Ironically, Linke drew a similar conclusion in Weimar, in
her admittance: ‘Political democracy in itself was not enough, and moreover it had
failed already’ (RD 363). In the German case this led to fascism. In the Turkish case it
reinforced a Strong State Tradition (Heper 1985) that was not fascist but rather drew
from ‘conventional wisdom’ cumulated in the empire. Turkey was left impoverished
after the war but had an advantage over Weimar. It did not suffer Inflation on that scale.
As the majority lived off the land, they were able to feed themselves. In the end,
nationalist forces pushed the imperialists out. Ankara defeated Istanbul. In November
1922, Mustafa Kemal abolished the sultanate, no longer recognizing its legitimacy.
Declaration of the modern Republic of Turkey took place on 29 October 1923. Out of
the ashes of empire evolved the modern Turkish Republic.
Imagine putting Britain in the 1923 Turkish context. No monarchy. Minimal
bourgeoisie. No capital to rebuild infrastructure. Paralyzed trade. Capitulations. No
skilled manpower. No up-to-date industry. Impoverished peasantry. Demeaned
populace. Yet based on what we know of Ottoman cultural inheritance, persistence and
adaptability, when I return to Mardin at the outset of this chapter, there were concepts,
habituation and habits upon which they could ‘refurbish’ and build a modern
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Republic—cumulated across a millennium as conventional wisdom. First, they had a
blueprint sketched out for a modern Republic from their century-old terms halk
(people), devlet (state), millet (nation) and hukuk (law) already practiced in the empire.
Second, there was a collective consciousness in the people having defeated imperialism.
Third, they had a leader—beloved or feared—determined to lift the people out of their
inferior status with Europe.
Hegel believed the State to be a ‘Divine idea on earth’ (1988: 39) and likened it
to constitution and causation as in building a house. ‘Building a house is, to begin with,
an inner goal and purpose… The elements are utilized according to their nature, and yet
they cooperate toward a product by which they themselves are being limited’ (p. 30).
Hobbes’ conception of the state was born out of modern ideas on individualism. For
Nietzsche the ‘state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie
creeps from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people’ (1987: 75). As a pragmatist, Veblen
defined ‘nation’ as an ‘organisation for collective offence and defence, in peace and war
[…] bound together by home-bred affinities of language, tradition […] sympathies and
sentiments (1919/1964: 147). Jean-Jacques Rousseau focused on ‘freedom’ and the
belief man is essentially born good but corrupted by his environment. Recognizing
humankind far from their free natural state in nature, the means with which civil society
could achieve a measure of some freedom was through well-developed social
institutions, what Rousseau worked out as the ‘social contract’ (1762/1964). In
Gökalp’s words a ‘social group must have an existence, an organized form and
institutions, in order to assert its existence in the consciousness of its members’ (1959:
79). The ‘social contract’ would protect freedoms against those with intent to enslave
others. In the Turkish case this was European imperialism. Should we find this
perception exaggerated, it is instructive to turn briefly to Mary Helen Stefaniak’s The
Turk and My Mother (2004) to sense how impingement of freedom by others remains in
the human psyche; the denial of ‘Live and Let Live’. The opening chapter of her book
begins with a reflection on her mother.
I suppose, especially people who lived hard lives in tiny villages like hers, in a part of Europe
[the Balkans] that was so used to being cut up and handed around like cake at the end of every
big and little war that my mother could tell you who was king when she was a girl but not what
he was king of (p. 15).
The desire to build and govern a Republic, free from foreign intervention, constituted
the ‘spirit’ of the Turkish pioneers; their possibility for ‘Live and Let Live’. Rousseau
reasoned good governance is cultivated through ‘advantageous exchange’ between
government and citizens such that each side benefit (1964: 375). This bears striking
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resemblance with the former Ottoman habituation teamül but in a twentieth century
setting. Mustafa Kemal read many Enlightenment philosophers but was most fond of
Rousseau, perhaps for his emphasis on ‘freedom’ and inherent human ‘good’. We recall
‘good’ for Veblen constituted purposeful work for common good over selfish gain.
Whichever way we define state, as an abstract idea considered western in origin,
it is still widely discussed. As we see across the case study, state in the Turkish context,
was perhaps not an abstract idea alone, but possibly an idea realized through concrete
practice to construct a new life, a new chance to live. Marx did not favor the state.
Nevertheless, the Turks engaged in revolutionary praxis in their ability to build a nation
from the bottom up such that they change their situation. ‘The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it’ (Emphasis
added, Marx 1845). Constructing a new life, working on the self to help others is an
instinct of intentional good for Veblen. Governance as a ‘philosophical system for life’
(Kutadgu Bilig) that consults ‘reason’ and ‘knowledge’ was alive in the Turkish psyche.
It was necessary to ‘refurbish’ old concepts with a multiplicity of new ones to overcome
their learned sense of inferiority to Europe. Not just to ‘catch up’ it was a means to
reinstate dignity in common man. I intuit Turkish spirit of insubordination, spearheaded by Republican pioneers, might resemble a similar spirit in Linke, who too
worked to overcome learned inferiority in Weimar. They had to cultivate what they had
in hand, which was not very much, but at the same time was everything. The people.
Common man.
Although borrowing ideas from Europe, the Turks also looked farther afield.
Halidé Edip Adivar writing to Mustafa Kemal on 10 August 1919 warned ‘these
Powers’ want to ‘divide up the country’ (Kemal 1929: 83). Vassif Bey wrote to Mustafa
Kemal: ‘I look upon England as our eternal enemy and America as the lesser of the two
evils’ (p. 97). Refet Bey also preferred an American to a British mandate stating rather
bluntly that a British mandate ‘would lead every human community into slavery and
suffocate the minds and consciousness of the people’ (p. 95). Thus, the lesser evil was
the United States, whom they perceived at the time, a distant somewhat disinterested
polity. They reasoned the Americans more advanced industrially and truly western.
Accused of being a reductionist, international relations scholar, Alexander
Wendt, poses a realist and constructivist argument that ‘states are people too’ (2004:
291). ‘They are ‘intentional’ or purposive actors. […] They might be organisms,
understood as forms of life; and they might have collective consciousness’ (p. 291). ‘In
the case of the state, for example, individuals would have to share an ‘idea of the state’
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as an actor with particular interests’ (p. 298). In short, all within Turkey must embark
on the same journey. ‘Common knowledge gives groups enough structure for their
members to act rationally on collective intentions’ for Wendt, such that, ‘groups can do
things individuals cannot’ (p. 299).
However, owing to century-old habits in Ottoman habituation, some regions
within the vast empire were still accustomed to certain privileges (former hub and
spoke). When a Kurdish revolt (1925), led by the same men who were allies in the War
of Independence, made demands for a Kurdish national government and return to holy
law and Caliphate (Zürcher 1991: 81) the ‘native-bias’, on behalf of the RPP
responsible to secure the nation, reacted defensively to protect the territory all had
fought to secure. Turkey’s geographical position very much dictated its fate. While the
Bolsheviks declared the ‘right to self-determination’, British and French colonizers in
neighboring Arab regions were forever a threat. Robert Olson points out British
Lieutenant Colonel A. Rawlinson stirred up a Kurdish revolt in 1920-21, apparently not
aware his actions had created false hopes for a Kurdish nation (1987: 98). Martial law
was declared across the fledgling Turkish Republic, ending any socialist aspirations also
(Tunçay 1994: 157).
In this case, the umbrella idea to unite Turkish common man would be
secularism over former Sunni Islam. The Turkish language, which Mardin indicated
was already the pretext for unity in the empire, became the official language. Not all
facets of democracy like civil rights and freedoms were immediately addressed. Neither
urban-rural contradictions, namely the expropriation of large landowners exploiting
rural labor, nor some skeptical conservatives who wished to return to the constitutional
monarchy, were immediately resolved.
Republican pragmatist pioneers began by rewriting laws. The CUP comprising
the former ‘Association for the Defence of National Rights’ ADNR, renamed itself the
RPP or Republican People’s Party (1923) (Zürcher 1991: 30). Borrowing from the
French Third Republic model of laïcité, separating religion and state, the ‘cultural
revolution’ underway completely restructured political, legal, economic and education
institutions. The Caliphate and office of the Grand Vizier Şeyh ül-Islam (1924) and
tarikats (religious brotherhoods) were abolished. Medrese religious schools were closed
(1924) and replaced by the Ministry of Education. The Unification of Instruction Law
(1924) safeguarded that all students receive the same secular education. The Hat Law
(1925) banned the fez and turban. The calendar was westernized. Adoption of the Swiss
Civil Code (1926) gave equal status to women and right to vote, ‘one of the most
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revolutionary acts in terms of the de-Islamization of social life’ (Toprak 1987: 224).
The Italian penal code and German Commercial code were also adopted the same year.
The Law for the Encouragement of Industry was introduced in 1927. In 1928 the Latin
alphabet replaced Arabic script. Islam as a state religion was dropped (1928) but
Turkification of the Islamic call to prayer was enforced (1932). And in 1929, the
Foreign Trade Regulation Law was put into effect.
Linke noted some facts that might point to a somewhat distributive economy.
Swamps were drained to rid them of breeding places for mosquitos causing malaria.
Peasants were compensated, as the government encouraged and assisted them to
cultivate cotton (AD 60). Erzincan was to be the future region for silk production (AD
60-61). Mulberry trees were distributed free of charge (AD 61). Afforestation had
started in parts of the country. Top-breed horses and bulls could be borrowed for
breeding purposes. A serum institute was established (AD 61). Since 1925 the
government engaged in an active fight against trachoma, the Egyptian eye disease.
Millions of people received free examinations regularly (AD 223). Similar campaigns
against tuberculosis and venereal disease were underway (AD 259).
Once institutions had been established and new laws written the global
Depression set in. Étatism, state-run and owned industry, was declared by the RPP in
1932 as a rational means for ‘monetary stability and balanced budgets’ (Olson and İnce
1977: 230). This ‘mixed economy’ experiment allowed several modes of production to
operate simultaneously like private enterprise, state-run and state-owned industry and
agricultural production. The Turkish planned economy was among the first applications
of general planning to the capitalist system in the 1930s (p. 230). To date Turkey’s
‘economic miracle’ has not been recognized. Additionally, it was a model for other
developing nations at the time (Altuğ et al, 2008: 394). Mehmet Özay points out the
varied and diverse understanding or misunderstanding of the critics toward Étatsim.
Kemalist development strategy emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as a pragmatic experiment in
étatism (Devletçilik), which has been variously described as “a modernised form of
merchantilism,” “an advanced type of socialism,” as a “‘third way’ outside capitalism and
socialism” or, more critically, a system providing “a poorly managed capitalist economy in
which most of the capital happens to be supplied by the government.” The immediate origins of
étatism have been ascribed to either contemporary communism or fascism, but more
realistically, it was conceived as a home-grown strategy to meet the challenges of nationbuilding rather than as a dogmatic, universalistic ideology (1983: 49).
According to Özay, the main idea behind Kemalist socioeconomic development was to
‘raise the standard of living’ (p. 50), which is interesting here, if we consider Veblen’s
ideas on the subject. This does not imply emulating wealth but rather to achieve some
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standard of living that meets basic needs to pull the poor out of dire poverty. Mustafa
Kemal made this clear in his opening speech at the economic congress in Izmir in 1923.
He wanted to tackle the economic devastation left from the war. Referring to the times
as the ‘People’s Era’ he also implied it was an era of ‘economic ideals’ to be replaced
by ‘fatalist attitudes’ about poverty being a ‘virtue’. He stated: ‘This country of ours is
one that is not only fit but most suitable to be made into a paradise for our children and
grandchildren’ (p. 50). To achieve this the ‘state apparatus would have to promote
reforms in legal and social as well as economic spheres in order to offset centuries of
neglect and backwardness inflicted upon the Turkish nation by the Ottoman sultans’ (p.
51). Birdal has illustrated how this neglect was not self-made but rather with European
exploitation collaborating with the sultans. Özay points to negative and positive impacts
of Étatism. First, it ‘perpetuated a collective psychology of state paternalism’ whereby
the government was looked to for everything, a ‘native bias’ from the days of the
Ottoman sultan (p. 53). Second, contrary to earlier statements about the ‘economic
miracle’ Özay claims Étatism did not ‘accelerate the rate of aggregate economic
growth’ (p. 53). While industry did thrive it sacrificed the agricultural economy. He
makes no mention of WWII as a possible factor. Third, he claims it breeds a kind of
‘cradle-to-grave’ form of ‘welfareism’ (p. 56). But a positive impact for Özay was the
cultivation of ‘self-reliance’ (p. 54).
Unlike what might be expected of a dictatorship, there was, indeed, lively debate
around the subject. Mustafa Türkeş (2001) in his recent study on the Kadro journal89—
that supported the ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism—points out the varied
views on Étatism (p. 95). Ahmet Ağaoğlu favored economic liberalism, using Henry
Ford as an example. Ahmet Hamdi Başar, on the other hand, argued the ‘aim should be
economic self-reliance, in the sense of a self-sustaining economy’ and ‘advocated a
planned economy’. For Başar, ‘a planned economy was the only way to avoid the
devastating effects of the world economic depression, which Turkey and other countries
were currently going through’ (p. 97). Okyar suggests, the founders of Étatism ‘never
gave a precise and exact formulation of what they had in mind’ (1985: 103). For Okyar:
‘Etatism can be considered an independent economic system, in the genuine meaning of
the term, something different from capitalism on one side and from socialism on the
other’. The advantages far outweighed the disadvantages (p. 103).
In sum, I hope to have outlined across this chapter a ‘native-bias’, both
89
Contributors were patriotic Left intellectuals like Burhan Asaf Belge and Ismail Hüsrev Tökin.
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progressive and sometimes reactionary, in the evolution from Empire to Republic.
While the (r)evolution was largely claimed to be a social revolution from above (Savran
1992: 51-54) perhaps Linke’s 1935 journey can shed some new light on what appears to
be, in the discussions above, a relatively contentious area of debate for and against the
étatist experiment. Forever flexible and adaptive, Turkish common man seems to have
worked under exceedingly trying circumstances, as did Linke, simply for ‘a chance to
live’. Quoting Mustafa Kemal, Linke wrote: ‘Never expect anything from the past; take
only advice from the past. Expect everything from the future. Let your eye and soul
always face forward. Let your life be filled with joys and happiness’ (AD 222). On this
note, we enter the case study to discover what Linke saw and experienced and her
unique ‘tender empiricist’ reading of it all.
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—Chapter 6—
‘Idle Curiosity’
The Turkish Case
Home truth two: Just remember every culture, every
civilization, every literature has its own splendour.
—Moris Farhi (2007: 436)
She was already a whole generation ahead of me, a
generation not troubled with memories and sufferings of the
war or the confusion of Europe on which she had turned her
back. —Lilo Linke (AD 222)
After the (r)evolution Turkish pedagogy worked to reshape society anew. This chapter
examines pedagogy as a facilitator of cultural evolution and Linke’s experiences of
educational reform put into practice. New methods of ‘experiential learning’ meant
education became the ‘emancipation and enlargement of experience’ (Dewey
1910/2007: 156). I begin by weaving Veblen’s ‘idle curiosity’ (1914/1964: 86) into
pedagogy and workmanship. This follows with the blueprints for Turkish pedagogy put
forth by early twentieth century thinkers Gökalp, Baltacıoğlu, Ülken and Dewey. In the
1930s, to circumvent obstacles of the global Depression, Gökalp’s sociology of ‘going
to the people’ was revisited. Wherever Linke went she found common man, particularly
the youth, engaged in learning. Her experiential narratives are testament to Turkish
pedagogues theories put into practice in cities, towns, villages and labor settings. I
suggest Linke shared a common emancipatory praxis of ‘experiential learning’ with the
Turks. Is it naïve to assume an entire nation metamorphosed into a classroom working
for betterment of the whole? Did the new pedagogy succeed in recreating the Republic?
In March 1935 Linke arrived in Istanbul. First claiming it represented a
‘shapeless white patch on which a few scenes out of the Arabian Nights were crudely
painted’ she immediately corrected herself.
Most of us remain faithful to the fairy-tales we heard in our youth. If we travel, we attempt more
often than not to find those places in which our imagination was at home at the age of six, and
rarely is it something new we are looking for. But again and again, untaught by experience, we
are disappointed (AD 3).
‘Untaught by experience’ alludes to how Linke will ‘unlearn’ the ‘learned’. But did she
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have no idea about Turkey? On 24 March 1923 Mustafa Kemal made the cover of Time
Magazine and again on 21 February 1927. Halidé Edip Adivar, a prominent female
intellectual active in the revolution and founding the Grand National Assembly in
Ankara alongside Mustafa Kemal, made international news from 1928 onward. Did
Turkey’s early aspirations and later success at building an independent Republic on her
own terms attract Linke’s curiosity? Was Turkey a symbol of hope for some? In Linke’s
Cancel All Vows, a clue appears in the jubilance of her main protagonist Marthe when
German professor Fink was granted a teaching post in Istanbul. ‘Marthe suddenly
closed her eyes and smiled whilst two large tears were rolling down her cheeks’. Linke
continued, ‘she [Marthe] had done right in refusing to abandon hope’ (CAV 348).
Engagement with the Left and Linke’s friendships with German Jews made her better
placed to detect early signs of danger and later when danger arrived to search
possibilities for a ‘chance to live’. Habituated to a hostile Britain and Europe riddled
with fascism, it was difficult just to stay live. Linke’s relationship with the Stolpers and
Volkswirt circle made her aware of German-Jewish academic emigration to Turkey. On
17 September 1933 Albert Einstein wrote to the Turkish president İsmet İnönü,
requesting Turkey grant refuge to German Jews (Riesman 2007: 262). He met
Einstein’s request.
Linke approached encounters and experiences with ‘tender empiricism’ to see
anew and thus ‘unlearn’ prejudices and misconceptions about Turkey and encouraged
her readers to do the same. She put Jameson’s theory of how a writer must ‘go and live’
in the ‘new society’ into practice (McLoughlin 2007: 110). Jameson recognized that
Linke’s ‘sense of responsibility was full-grown’ (JN1 272). In search of a ‘shared
humanity’ in the way Jameson used the term, Linke had no trepidation in meeting
peasants in village homes, workers in factories and a plethora of low- and high-ranking
officials, educators, students, engineers, doctors and soldiers. She was surprised to learn
they succeeded where she and her friends in Weimar had failed. ‘We, too, had
endeavoured to reform a whole population. We had failed, probably because we had
asked and given too much at the same time too little. Not everyone knows what to do
with liberty’ (AD 72). Linke refers to all the efforts to which she herself, together with
fellow youth in the Trades union and later members of the DDP Youth League had
worked to bring democracy to Weimar such that common man flourish.
Veblen’s ‘Idle Curiosity’
Partly ontological, partly a psychological inquiry, Veblen thought ‘idle
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curiosity’ was a predisposition of human conduct. People want to know things. But they
exercise curiosity—what he called ‘surplus energy’—only once ‘graver interests do not
engross their attention’—in short, once needs of ‘nutrition, growth and reproduction’
have been met (1914/1964: 86). The majority of common man use their time to meet
everyday necessities. They have little ‘idle’ time, unless, they become idle due to a lack
of work. Should this be the case, idleness may lead to predatory war-like tendencies
when coerced by imbecile institutions. But Veblen also admitted ‘common man does
not eagerly pursue the quest of the idle curiosity, and neither its guidance nor its award
of fact is mandatory on him’. A few curious individuals, Veblen called ‘wayfarers’ or
‘sporadic individuals’ accused of being ‘accounted dreamers’ of ‘unsound mind’—were
responsible for the cumulative achievement of ‘systematized knowledge’. Those with
‘instinctive curiosity’ disturbed the ‘habitual body of knowledge on which
workmanship draws’ (p. 87).
Human curiosity is doubtless an idle propensity, in the sense that no utilitarian aim enters in its
habitual exercise; but the material information which is by this means drawn into the agent’s
available knowledge may none the less come to serve the ends of workmanship (p. 88).
Veblen’s use of ‘idle’ and ‘utilitarian’ leaves an ambiguousness attached to ‘curiosity’.
When imbricated in workmanship, ‘idle’ might mean idle workers, machines and
factories at the hands of Vested Interests who manage the industrial system inefficiently
but ‘idle’ may apply to an ‘idle’ workman ready to work for common good. Idleness,
particularly among Turkish peasants, was couched in poverty following the dissolution
of the Ottoman Empire and constant war. In Germany, six million unemployed in 1932
were powder kegs of ‘idleness’ waiting for Hitler to light the fuse.
Linke directed her idle curiosity toward purposeful work. Her experiences and
writing up these experiences are constructed in such a way that they allow contradiction
of the ‘habitual body of knowledge’. ‘Workmanship makes use of whatever is available’
(Veblen 1914/1964: 88). Linke’s ‘idle curiosity’ evolved as a mission to tell the truth of
her times—or as she put it to Jameson in London ‘carry on our work and ideas’ (TWE
xxxiii)—cultivated out of ‘vitally interlocking relationships’ in fortunate encounters.
Encounters in themselves were trial and error chances. A different set of encounters
might have set her on the way to embracing Nazism over life. Curiosity led her to other
curious souls. Thus ‘idle curiosity’ is a ‘fortuitous circumstance’ (Veblen p. 88) of trial
and error. If one gets positive results, experience becomes repeated learning (continuity
for Dewey) that evolve habits.
To be curious is half the equation. To channel curiosity into knowledge is key.
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In reference to Goethean science, Holdrege emphasized earlier, to be curious about a
plant requires one ‘think like a plant lives’. While Rancière claims an individual can
learn outside institutional education—and this notion is not necessarily untrue—it
would be foolish, however, in the case of Turkey, to assume the peasantry could learn
piecemeal without institution or educator. There was scant educational infrastructure in
many regions of the Republic. Schooling did have a function. But what pedagogical
philosophy; what student-teacher practice; what common aim would form a blueprint
for Turkish education? Here, I return to a more emancipatory notion of pedagogy, along
the lines of Freire. Turkish pragmatists saw education a means to improve their citizens
to work for a better future and sovereignty against imperialism. In César’s work (2005)
on Freirean pedagogy, Ana Maria Araújo (Freire’s widow) humbly put forth:
We have no choice but to believe in education. However, I must emphasize: not the type of
education that makes us bureaucrats and brutalizes our minds, but as Freire taught us, education
that carries within itself critical historical practice and situated in a dialogue of love (p. ix).
Freire’s ‘dialog of love’ has dual implications here. It represents Linke’s dialog with
those she encountered but also ‘Turkish educators’ efforts at a ‘dialog of love’ for the
people. César’s work cites racism as one example that can be overcome by experience.
Racism is learned. To emancipate oneself from racism, one must question and work out
these attitudes in an internal process found in experience. As César put it:
When one humbly acknowledges and works out these attitudes in oneself, a sense of freedom for
new emancipatory and equalizing possibilities becomes evident; one is able to become a positive
force for the change of oppressive social, historical, economic and philosophical structures,
rather than an instrument of their reproduction (p. 4).
Habituated to the ‘odious idea of racial purity’ in Germany, Linke learned to confront
racism and in doing so became a ‘positive force’ for change (AD 10). Wolfgang Zorn
points out, in relation to student politics in Weimar, there was a racial element in some
of their fraternities (corporations). In 1928-1929 over fifty-six percent were members in
these corporations (1970: 129). Originating in Austria but spilling over to the Germans
was the idea of a nation based on race and a community of ‘German blood’ (p. 131).
Despite the existence of Left student movements, the völkisch ideology of right-wing
students, with its roots in neo-romanticism, even extended to Catholic student
fraternities. Weimar wanted students to be loyal to the state. Marxist and pacifist
professors were ‘violently attacked by the völkisch students’ (p. 139). From 1930 on,
over-crowded universities denied admission to Jewish students claiming them
‘academically alien’ (Schulfremde) (p. 138). Business seems to have played a part.
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Deutsche Studentenwerk e. V., the charitable university organization, which in 1924 broke away
from the Deutsche Studentenschaft and whose founder and president, Carl Duisberg, was
managing director of I. G. Farben and President of the National Federation of German Industry.
As ‘father of the students’ he ensured regular donations from big business. ‘Anti-capitalist
sentiments, intensified by the world economic crisis, further strengthened antisemitic tendencies,
while the völkische denounced both the ‘red’ and the ‘golden’ (bankers) Internationals (p. 139140).
As a member of the DDP Youth League, it was precisely these youth Linke was trying
to organize. Thus Linke was well aware of the term ‘race’. She resisted it wherever she
journeyed. Even in Ecuador she recalled the notion of ‘race’ in her thoughts on illiteracy
there: ‘Maybe you agree that, just as racial discrimination is not so much the problem of
the so-called inferior races as of the discriminator, so illiteracy in the world of today is
really the problem of the literates’.94 Learning through experience helped her see anew
and her authorship guided the reader to do the same. César’s fields of knowledge—
social, historical, economic and philosophical structures—also reflect Veblen’s corpus
of work and Linke’s as a self-fashioned pre-cultural studies practitioner. In the
Deweyan sense, her knowledge was born from ‘interaction’ and ‘continuity’ by building
one fortuitous effort on top of another that evolved into emancipatory praxis.
Turning to how ‘idle curiosity’ was imbricated in Turkish pedagogy during the
early Republican era, I suggest, educators, sociologists, politicians and philosophers
harnessed their idle curiosity to work for utilitarian aims (workmanship) to create new
social habits. Rather than the populace learning by rote, drawing from diverse
pedagogues, educators came to practice a style of Dewey’s learning by doing not so
unlike aims of the German Neue Pädagogik. To clarify, Turkish pedagogy was not
German pedagogy. The Turks had their own approach to educational reforms. Mustafa
Kemal and his peers worked to instill self-confidence in the populace to inspire their
insubordinate spirit to change their ‘situation’. And we recall of Freire, ‘[h]uman beings
are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more they […] critically
act upon it’ (1996: 90). Turkish ‘idle curiosity’ strove to cultivate moral, responsible,
independent thinkers to work for betterment of the whole, actualized as other-regarding
over self-regarding.
Turkish ‘Idle Curiosity’
According to educator and folklorist İlhan Başgöz: ‘The great fervour of the war
effort and ideals involved, tremendously stimulated the will to read and to learn’ (1968:
43). It was a race for minds. Occupying forces, collaborating with the Sultan in Istanbul,
94
Lilo Linke, Not As Easy As ABC, 14 June 1948, 09:15 - 09:30 am. BBC Archives, Reading, UK.
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went to extremes to persuade people to abandon resistance and accept the Treaty of
Sèvres.95 To circumvent foreign intervention, adult evening classes to improve reading
and writing were given in small towns and cities. Even religious leaders supported the
effort forming The Committee of Enlightenment (p. 44). In 1925, it became the
Teacher’s Association and held classes in Ankara, Artvin, Antalya, Ayas, Isparta, Urfa,
Simar, Trabzon, Konya and Küthaya. ‘[P]eople’s desire for education was so great that
they frequently contributed building materials from their own homes for the
construction of schools’ (p. 55 fn 15). Self-sacrificing individuals worked for common
good, as there was an insufficient number of schools, high illiteracy and the Ottoman
tradition of theoretical over practice-based knowledge. Başgöz underlines: ‘Western
powers contributed nothing to the economic development of Turkey until 1935, when
Turkey became strategically important to a Europe facing the threat of a second world
war’ (p. 52). ‘Whatever the government sought to do; it had to finance its operation by
asking for sacrifices from the people, many of whom were barely above the subsistence
level’ (p. 97).
Ottoman pedagogy was divided into religious, foreign and Ottoman state
schools Gökalp viewed the malaise of the Empire. Critical of intellectuals who ‘acquire
their education only through their studies’ he argued they ‘are neither representatives of
the culture nor are they the élite of the nation’ (Gökalp 1959: 238). Education must
embody the ‘soul and mind’ (p. 239) and not be oriented to ‘economic utilitarianism’
only to ‘gain money’ (p. 240). He placed high value on the humanities, appreciative of
Schiller, Goethe and the like, in realizing their national literature (p. 241). ‘The purpose
of education’, Gökalp believed ‘is the adaptation of the individual to his social and
natural environment’ (Başgöz p. 25). Children perceive their environment through
‘reality judgements’ that are ‘products of the conscious mind and the capacity to form
them may be developed by a scientific process of training’ (p. 25). He espoused national
education was deeply rooted in culture, citing the differences between French, British
and German pedagogy.
Turkish education reformers held diverse views. Some sympathized with
‘individualistic’ Anglo-Saxon pedagogy that emphasized self-reliance as the best way to
‘improve the abilities and faculties of the individual’ through ‘inventive and creative
methods rather than learning through rote memory’ (p. 27-28). Others were concerned
this pedagogy might incite selfishness over the collective. Some posed Islamic
95
British intelligence agencies offered salaries higher than what cabinet ministers earned to encourage
enlistment in the Sultan’s Army of Holy Law. Resistance was seen as Bolshevik (Başgöz p. 42).
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education ‘help[s] children attain careers through which they will find religious
salvation, worldly happiness and moral strength’ but this required ‘obeying divine law’
(p. 28). A former superintendent of the schools in Salonika favoured pragmatic
education that was financially feasible to meet local needs and ‘emphasized the role of
the teacher in the economic and social life of the village’ (p. 29).96
Mustafa Necati, a brilliant, young educator headed the first Ministry of
Education (1925-1928) and established the Training and Pedagogy Department (Talim
ve Terbiye). He formed a school construction department, student health services,
founded libraries, textbook publication, organized inspectors, raised teacher’s salaries
and wrote primary school curricula (p. 91-92). Borrowing ideas from Turkish
pedagogues and Dewey’s notion of ‘knowledge of life’ or ‘experiential learning’ (p.
112), Necati made the Ministry of Education a focus of intellectual and cultural life (p.
93). Policy and practice of young educators like Necati, cultivated a revolution in
education. Some reactionary religious affiliations resisted the Latin alphabet, coeducation and functional education in villages (p. 91) causing a schism between
conservative city council members and modern educators (p. 103). Hamdullah Suphi
(twice Minister of Education) worried some conservative city council members,
are persons who are afraid that the people will become enlightened, and who, like all parasites,
benefit from the ignorance and blindness of the masses in order to fill their stomachs and their
purses. […] How can we possibly imagine that these local notables and landlords, these men of
influence who take away all that the peasant produces with the sweat of his brow and his own
labor without spending any effort themselves, will sincerely work toward providing education
for the people? […] Can you recall a single year when these two men [from Kastamonu] did not
try to use every possible means to scare away new schoolteachers (p. 103-104)?
This schism rested not only in education but addressed a larger issue as to how the
Republic should be structured, to which I now briefly remark.
Although Robinson (1951) and Zürcher (1994) accused Atatürk of dictatorship,
İrem (2002) suggests there was a plurality of heterogeneous philosophical-political
views. Apart from reactionary religious anti-modernists, two differing views on
Kemalism existed. One originated in positivist secular ideology of the European
Enlightenment—Gökalp and his peers abiding by the evolutionary sociologies of Comte
and Durkheim (p. 93)—whose position was reflected in the excerpt above. Another
group of self-declared conservatives, distancing themselves from reactionary antimodernists, comprised five intellectuals: İsmail Hakkı Baltacıoğlu (1886-1978); Peyami
Safa (1899-1961); Ahmet Ağaoğlu (1869-1939); Hilmi Ziya Ülken (1901-1974); and
Mustafa Sekip Tunç (1886-1958) (p. 88). These Turkish modernists were concerned
96
His ideas were used later as the foundation for the Village Institutes (Köy Enstitüleri) in the late 1930s.
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how structures of nation-state and capitalism would fit with Muslim society. Aligned to
Bergsonian philosophy—popular in the late Ottoman Empire (1910)—they argued
positivist ideologues (Gökalp’s circle) implemented ‘mechanical theories of social
change’ (p. 93). Bergson contended there was a split in WWI between the creative
forces of France against the mechanical forces of Prussia. Turkish Bergsonian
intellectuals equated the mechanical imperialist forces (and collaborationist Ottoman
government) that occupied Anatolia, opposed the ‘Turkish will to freedom’ (p. 95). For
İrem, ‘rival Bergsonian nationalists spelled out the terms of “free action,” “creation,”
and “will.” Key Bergsonian terms such as “vital energy,” “intuition,” and “elan vital”
were also incorporated into the new voluntarist nationalist vocabulary of these
intellectuals’ (p. 95). Thus, overall reform was influenced by heterogeneous groups
rather than from positivist ideologues alone.
Writer, politician and educator Baltacıoğlu was a representative of the new
pedagogy movement in the Empire and began his career at the Darülfünun (antecedent
of Istanbul University) in 1908. A pioneer of adult education, he gave conferences in
1914 on Terbiyei Avam (Training of the Public) and lectures on art, sport and education
(Başgöz p. 121). The same year he began teaching psychology at the Teachers School
for Girls and was appointed the general director for elementary schools and later the
director of higher education. In 1920 he became the dean at the Faculty of Letters at
Darülfünun and the president in 1923. Baltacıoğlu advised Mustafa Kemal on religious
reform (İrem p. 90). He taught sociology and ethics until 1933 (p. 89). While his ideas
differed from Gökalp, the two united on the pedagogy of ‘experiential learning’ (Başgöz
p. 60). In 1933, Baltacıoğlu published İçtimai Mektep (The Society School). He stated:
‘It is not the skills or characteristics which exist, but the men who possess and embody
them’ whether a scholar, soldier, farmer or gardener (p. 60). Theatre is ideal pedagogy.
The presentation of a play in school was not just an exercise in language or literature, or merely
for entertainment and publicity. Pupils should originate, cast, direct, publicize, finance and
review the production as a real experience, a vehicle for learning language skills, occupations,
self-confidence and the habits of purposeful activity—and saying something that society needed
to hear. Pupils should learn as apprentices until the methods and skills become habitual
(Emphasis added, p. 61).
Baltacıoğlu’s ideas echo Veblen’s spirit of workmanship in the suggestion ‘habits of
purposeful activity’ become ‘habitual’. Moreover, his preference of theatre as a medium
for learning is similar to Walter Benjamin’s Program for a Proletarian Children’s
Theater (1929): ‘It is only in the theater that the whole of life can appear as a defined
space, framed in all its plenitude; and this is why proletarian children’s theater is the
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dialectical site of education’ (Benjamin 1999: 202). This is an important point because
later in Ecuador Linke would make extensive use of puppet theatre to educate the poor.
Baltacıoğlu viewed theatre a pragmatic means to encourage self-reliance within a
collective where students would benefit from ‘real experience’.
Sociologist, educator and philosopher Ülken had less interest in politics and
made his career in academia. Between 1921 and 1933 he taught philosophy, geography
and psychology at high schools. In 1927 he founded the Türk Felsefe ve Içtimaiyyat
Cemiyete (Turkish Philosophy and Sociology Association) (İrem p. 91). Mustafa Kemal
offered him tenure in 1933 at the newly founded Istanbul University as Associate
Professor of Turkish Civilization (p. 91). But Ülken was later sent to the University of
Berlin library in 1933. His views on pedagogy reasoned that a philosophical ethic must
be taught in both eğitim (education) and öğretim (instruction). Gestalt psychology,
psychotherapy, behaviorism, clinical psychology and the like, only led to ‘narrow
thinking’ if scientific knowledge failed to include a philosophy of moral ethics.
Just as narrow-minded scientists cause their own downfall by decreeing the needlessness of
philosophy, so do those who deny the philosophy of education, which is essential to establish the
true link between specialized knowledge on children and education (Ülken 2013: 25).
In some sense, Ülken already anticipated what concerned Freire in the 1970s, that
students not become ‘pasif bir alıcı’ (passive recipients) of knowledge (p. 12).
Philosophy is vital to pedagogy because humans are ‘moral’ beings. ‘For morality to
exist humans have to believe in other humans’ (p. 21). Ülken’s view was not far off the
mark with Gökalp’s defense of civic morality. ‘The positive goal of civic morality is
kindness, which means doing good to others’ (Gökalp p. 304). Ülken’s philosophy drew
from pedagogues Piaget and Dewey, western philosophers Bergson, Nietzsche, Spinoza
and eastern Sufism and Zoroastrianism. He treated pedagogy as a draft to be amended
over time (Ülken p. 26). Ülken’s aim was to bridge a perceived gap that might develop
in those individuals who felt severed from religion due to state secularism, likely
putting him at odds with Mustafa Kemal’s vision for positivist secular education and
religion kept a private affair (Fig. 11).
Mustafa Kemal’s insistence that education remain secular was evident when he
challenged European schools in Turkey to modernize, adopt co-education and remove
religious symbols from their institutions. He told a French reporter in 1924:
Although we may be suspicious of religious propaganda in your schools, we would like to have
them remain in the country. However, we cannot allow these schools to have privileges that our
own schools in Turkey do not possess. Your institutions can continue their existence only as
long as they are subject to the same laws and regulations governing the Turkish institutions of
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the same category (Başgöz p. 81).
‘Suspicion’ and ‘privilege’ found in Mustafa Kemal’s above statement is indicative of
Ottoman ‘native bias’. He clearly wanted to abolish unfair ‘privileges’ once so rampant
in the Empire. His reasoning would not permit foreign intervention, using education as
a means, in religious affairs particularly in the contentious interwar period. In 1933, he
reiterated this idea in the Cumhuriyet newspaper: ‘Our views regarding British,
American and German schools are also the same. […] Our new regime believes in
secularism as a modern principle, and we cannot tolerate any act that may destroy this
principle’ (p. 81). Linke appreciated his logic. ‘The intention behind these regulations
was at last to stamp out the religious feuds and to give all children the same kind of
education’ (AD 58).
Between 1924 and 1933, the Ministry of Education invited educational advisors
to submit reports on pedagogical reform. Linke acknowledged: ‘The Turks are not
diffident: they take good things wherever they can find them’ (AD 218). Turkish
pedagogues were already familiar with Dewey. Dewey visited in 1924 to study the
Turkish educational system (Trask 1964: 71). The Dewey Report (1924) stressed that
reform should be gradual and favored the pedagogy of Gökalp and Baltacıoğlu,
indicating there was an exchange of ideas here. He suggested community schools and
libraries should forge a link with society. The German Kuhne Report (1926) offered the
Latin alphabet replace Ottoman script—hardly a new idea as this was considered thirty
years prior—and that skilled labor and technicians be trained for railway development
in close alliance with German experts. The Belgium Omar Buyse Report (1927) put
emphasis on arts and crafts suggesting community foremen become part-time teachers.
The United States Kemerrer Group Report (1933), headed by the financial adviser
Edwin W. Kemerrer of Princeton University underlined Turkey’s education and
economic problems were linked. The report advised the Ministry of Education, train
farmers agricultural experts, engineers, technicians, industrial workers and, of course,
businessmen, in America (Başgöz p. 71; Trask 1964: 71). These reports reveal each
group imposed its own ‘national interests’ for what they thought, best for Turkey.
Dissatisfied with the way higher education was headed, the Grand National
Assembly invited Swiss professor Albert Malche to write a report on the Darülfünun.97
Teachers at the institute were all civil servants and included professors (müderris),
97
The institution still suffered from the oppressive regime of Abdulhamid stifling freedom of expression.
In 1912 it opened its doors to an unexpected number of female students taking courses in mathematics,
cosmography, physics, rights and responsibilities of women and hygiene (Başgöz p. 217-218).
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assistant professors (müderris muavini) and instructors (muallim) whose promotions
were based on merit and seniority (Gedikoğlu 1995: 153). Faculties at the university
included law, medicine (dentistry and pharmacy), letters, science and theology (p. 152).
Several major criticisms were raised in Malche’s report. First, many religious officers
(ulema) still held posts and harboured anti-modernist conservative religious ideas.
Second, the institution was viewed an ‘ivory tower’ removed from practical needs of the
Republic for its reproduction of theory without practice. Third, teachers did not conduct
research nor publish original works (p. 154). Malche also noted the method of
instruction was a ‘barrier to the education of students; it prevented them from becoming
curious’ (Emphasis added, p. 155). While the decision to replace some Turkish
academics with German ones, in areas of science that needed development, it might also
be viewed unfair, as a ‘great majority’ of Turkish professors were retired or transferred
to other duties (Başgöz p. 166). Baltacıoğlu lost his post. In 1933, the Darülfünun was
abolished and reopened as Istanbul University. Gedikoğlu argues the measure was to
control the university, claiming it lost academic freedom and autonomy after 1933.
Conducted under the scientific gaze of a Swiss professor with little knowledge of
Turkish culture, it was an unfair measure.
Recent scholarship by Arnold Reisman focuses on the Ministry of Education
decision and its long-term consequences, a subject that has ‘scarcely been noticed by
historians’ (p. 253). Mustafa Kemal and his peers were aware that traditional medresebased higher education taught some western sciences based on the French university
model, but these institutions lacked when compared with other western universities (p.
256). Atatürk’s Üniversite Reformu was more than university reform. It was a means to
continue the cultural (r)evolution. Many Germans and German-Jews alike did not have
a chance to go to Britain or the United States because of their restrictive immigration
laws. There was widespread anti-Semitism in America owing to the Depression (p.
258). ‘A select group of scholars from Germany with a record of leading-edge
contributions to various scientific disciplines and professions found refuge in Turkey,
helping to transform its university system’ (p. 253). The Turkish ministry of education
selected thirty-three candidates who were members of the Notgemeinschaft (p. 260).98
Mustafa Kemal hosted them at a banquet at Dolmabahçe Palace (p. 262). While
emphasis has been placed on Albert Einstein’s ‘plea’, in fact, the Turks took in not only
33 but also over 190 intellectuals from across Europe by 1939 (p. 268). Some were even
plucked from concentration camps (Reisman p. 275; Müller 1998: 297). I attribute this
98
Emergency Association of German Science founded on 30 October 1920.
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to the Turkish ‘native bias’ carried over from the Ottoman one, when the Empire
welcomed Spanish Jews fleeing persecution. Nobel physics laureate James Franck was
sent on a fact finding mission to Istanbul and on 25 October 1933, he found of the
situation at Istanbul University ‘a decided wish [among officials] to create a promising
scientific center in Istanbul’ (p. 269). Emigré professors took posts in medicine,
mathematics and the natural sciences more than law and the arts (p. 270). Philipp
Schwarz in the autumn of 1933 found antiquated microscopes and a lack of equipment
(p. 270). Determined German professors went to bazaars with Turkish professors to
scout for parts and made contact with merchants to get parts (p. 270). However, some
Turkish scholars were naturally offended by the German presence in the university halls
(p. 270). Some émigré professors settled in Turkey and contributed to her development.
Alfred Erich Frank (1884-1957) discovered oral-anti-diabetic drugs. Diabetes is a
significant problem in Turkey.100 Alfred Kantorowicz introduced public health dentistry
in Turkey (p. 275). Erich Auerbach wrote his seminal work Mimesis when in Turkey (p.
274).
Kader Konuk wrote extensively on the cultural exchange between the Turks and
the German émigrés. Turkey was not completely devoid of anti-Semitism but there was
far less of it than in Europe (2010: 82). Reşit Galip, the minister of education drew a
historical analogy to the German arrival as ‘compensation for the Byzantine scholars
who had fled Constantinople after its surrender to the Ottomans in 1453’ (p. 84).
Although the German émigrés were to learn Turkish as soon as possible, according to
Konuk, they were encouraged by the authorities to preserve their own culture (p. 177).
These ‘gestures of hospitality’ toward the émigrés were reasoned as a kind of godsend
tanrı misafiri in Turkish culture.101 Konuk equates it to transnational ‘reciprocity’. She
emphasizes Auerbach’s Mimesis opens with a scene of Odysseus returning from Troy in
the guise of a stranger. ‘Knowing neither his identity nor his intentions, Euryclea
washes the stranger’s feet, and in this generous welcome lies the revelation of
Odysseus’s true history’ (p. 179). To my mind, this German-Turkish pedagogical
collaboration resembled a ‘vitally interlocking relationship’ perhaps along the vein of
what Kropotkin wrote of ‘mutual aid’, rather than vulgar exploitation. Reisman
concludes, ‘persecution and inhumanity in one society brought about great
developmental leaps in another, more human setting’ (p. 280).
100
Professor Behçet Tahsin Kamay, one of his students, commented of Frank: ‘He reached the remotest
corners of Anatolia and he walked over every inch of the land. He visited the villages and went among
the villagers; he knocked on their doors and became their guest’ (Reisman p. 273).
101
The colloquial term is religious and cultural and means to be a ‘guest of god’.
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Economist Wilhelm Röpke, Stolper’s colleague and friend, arrived in Istanbul in
1933. It is highly probable Linke visited him on her journey to Istanbul, hence, her
earlier reference to Professor Fink (CAV 348). In addition, physician Rudolf Nissen,
orientalist Helmut Ritter, law professor Ernst E. Hirsch, economists Dankwart Rustow
and Fritz Neumark, and public administration professor Ernst Reuter also took posts
(Müller 1998: 294). Librarians advanced the library system, organized public lectures in
the provinces and established scientific journals (p. 299). Germans did not direct
educational reforms. Reşit Galip stipulated professors receive five-year contracts and
should learn and teach in Turkish. Upon completion of their education Turkish students
were to replace émigrés (Başgöz p. 296-97). This decision should not be assumed
exploitative, but rather, had its roots in their ‘native bias’ toward foreign scholars—
concerned they might dominate educational institutions—which as we have seen in the
Ottoman Empire was problematic.
Common ‘Idle Curiosity’
Dewey’s ethical notions of morality and sharing echo those of Ülken and
Gökalp. In Dewey’s words: ‘All education which develops power to share effectively in
social life is moral’. And it ‘forms a character which not only does the particular deed
socially necessary but one which is interested in that continuous readjustment which is
essential to growth. Interest in learning from all the contacts of life is the essential moral
interest’ (1916/1980: 370). Dewey’s learning from experience is similar to Baltacıoğlu’s
and interconnects with Veblen’s thoughts on the ‘formation of habits’. Dewey put it:
Plasticity or the power to learn from experience means the formation of habits. Habits give
control over the environment, power to utilize it for human purposes. Habits take the form both
of habituation, or a general and persistent balance of organic activities with the surroundings,
and of active capacities to readjust activity to meet new conditions. The former furnishes the
background of growth; the latter constitute growing. Active habits involve thought, invention,
and initiative in applying capacities to new aims. They are opposed to routine which marks an
arrest of growth. Since growth is the characteristic of life, education is all one with growing; it
has no end beyond itself. The criterion of the value of school education is the extent in which it
creates a desire for continued growth and supplies means for making the desire effective in fact
(Emphasis added, p. 57-58).
Routine for Dewey means ‘fossilized habits’ (1887/1967: 103). We learn from Linke’s
narrative that Turkish education was progressive and did create an ‘initiative’ for
students to use their ‘active capacities’ which metamorphosed into new habits and
habituation. Habits would take control of the environment to give it a democratic shape
and in the Freirean sense ‘human hands’ work to ‘transform the world’ (1996: 27).
Meeting some Trabzon students Linke wrote:
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I asked some of them what they wanted to do after leaving school. Their answers were polite and
self-assured. Most of them planned to go to university, and medicine and modern science were
the favourite faculties. When I asked them if they were prepared later to work in Anatolia, they
said: ‘Of course, we’ll go wherever we are needed’ (AD 149).
Students acknowledge they are ‘needed’ to develop and rebuild a confident and selfreliant nation. This brings to mind former Empire habituation when bureaucrats, judges
and clergy were continuously rotated to different regions. Here then, we do not
encounter a completely alien habit in modern Turkey but one rooted in an old habit,
now reworked as Dewey acknowledged habits could and would be, as Linke witnessed
young students happy to ‘go wherever we are needed’ for the common good as a moral
act of love toward fellow citizens and the Republic. Their new habit of thought was not
a result of purely scientific knowledge emanating from German academia but reflected
a ‘social concept’ along the lines of Gökalp, Ülken, Baltacıoğlu and Dewey combined,
as an emancipatory praxis through enlightened ‘action’ and ‘work’ as a moral of
‘sharing’ for the common good. The following passage from Dewey clarifies my point
above in his work Education From a Social Perspective (1913):
The social concept must therefore propose a twofold goal: on the one hand, action, work, must
no longer be considered servile and mechanical, but must become liberal and enlightened
through their contact with science and history; on the other hand, education must no longer
constitute the distinctive mark of a class. It must no longer be seen as a leisure pursuit, an
intellectual stimulant, but rather as a necessity for all free and progressive social action (19121914/1979: 120).
Dewey’s assertion that ‘education must no longer constitute the distinctive mark of a
class’ was conspicuously similar to Mustafa Kemal’s insistence there be no classes in
the Republic, perhaps influenced by Durkheim. Youth were curious to learn at new
institutions built for them. Remarking on their ‘ardour’ for work Linke stated:
I went to the local crafts-school, a modestly equipped institute where about sixty boys were
trained as mechanics, joiners, basket-makers, and in other simple crafts. You might find the
exact replica of this institute in any small provincial town of Great Britain, but probably the boys
there are not working with the same ardour and concentration as those in Sivas, to whom any
organized training is a comparatively new thing (AD 35).
Recent criticism of education in 1930s Turkey tends to portray it in a negative
light for allegedly excluding ethnicities. Başak İnce (2012) admits children’s education
was meant to instill ‘confidence’ as they were taught at school ‘[e]very Turk is born free
and lives free’ and ‘Turks are democratic, free, and responsible citizens’ (p. 120). But
she is quick to judge Turkish primary education for excluding ethnic minorities arguing
they were treated as ‘foreigners’. There is little doubt education was skewed to create
‘one language, one culture, one ideal’ which was the national ideal, but I believe it was
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born out of necessity as it played a significant role in constructing citizenship in Turkey.
With an aim to knit diverse ethnicities into one Turkish state, it is instructive to
consider parallel situations in other countries at the same time. Canada—a remote
fledgling nation on the way to becoming—relied on immigration for its existence.
Millions had fled to Canada to escape war and famine before and after WWI. Anderson,
an inspector of schools in Yorkton (Saskatchewan) posed, ‘we may well ask whether
this insweeping immigration can be Canadianized. The safety and happiness of our
nation depend upon their assimilation’ (1918: 88). Curiously, Anderson added: ‘We
may despise the “foreigner” and all that is non-English, but the fact remains that this
element is here to stay […] The paramount factor in racial fusion is undoubtedly the
education of the children of these non-English races’ (Emphasis added p. 89). Use of
the word ‘despise’ is instructive as it points to toleration of immigrants more than a
genuine embracing of them. Aware ‘sectarian religious jealousies’ and ‘private schools’
retarded education in the United States (p. 197) he presciently recognized an
‘uninspected and unregulated parochial school is a serious menace to the healthy
development of any nation’ (p. 202). To circumvent this problem, educators devised the
‘School Fair’ as a factor for racial assimilation, as a means for ‘foreigners’ to showcase
their cultural wares—pie bakes, handicrafts, and the like (p. 203); neutral workmanship,
I suggest, to which ‘foreigners’ could be proud. Anderson described the practice.
At one centre children of Bohemian, Hungarian, Swedish, German, Belgian, and Polish
parentage took part, and their parents mingled freely as they proudly examined the work of their
respective children; at another fair boys and girls of Ruthenian, Scotch, Welsh, Assyrian, and
English parents had their work arranged side by side on the long tables; but throughout the entire
day the children used no language but English (p. 207).
Anderson’s assurance that children used only English is a curious one. In fact, my father
experienced these very educational practices in the 1930s. In a one-room schoolhouse
he was beaten when he spoke Ukrainian. Moreover, he clearly recalls indigenous
children treated far worse. Apparently Canadian educators believed: ‘Just as the instinct
of fear in the child may be modified and removed by education, so, in the case of the
illiterate and superstitious among the immigrants to Canada, education in the wider
sense will tend to remove these retarding influences’ (p. 212). Anderson equates this to
a lack of uniform textbooks in the western provinces and that this ‘chaotic state of
affairs’ stemmed from educators who were ‘guilty of neglect’ for not ‘energetically
attacking the problem’ (p. 216). The Saskatchewan Public Education League published
a pamphlet Saskatchewan’s Great Campaign for Better Schools. The 1915-1916 copy is
written from the top down with no contribution from the ‘foreigners’ below. It reads
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like a directive for how things will be. John Charyk (1971) points out in the 1930s many
schoolhouses were abandoned or went bankrupt (p. 53). His exemplar three-volume
work is dedicated to ‘pioneers’ from below whose self-sacrifices built rural education in
Canada. In today’s context, José Macias (1996) points to ethnic exclusion in education
in the United States, Australia and in Europe.
Pointed out earlier, in the late Ottoman period cumulative habituation carried
over to the Republic and meant language needed reform. Latinization of the alphabet
was discussed in the Empire but none attempted the initiative under the autocratic rule
of Abdulhamid. Gökalp saw a schism in language use between Anatolians and the élite
palace culture what he called ‘Ottoman Esperanto’—a combined language of Arabic,
Persian and Turkish (1959: 276). For him, the national language was Istanbul Turkish
that was spoken but not written while the Turkish dialect found in Ottoman Turkish
(Osmanlıca) was written but not spoken (p. 290). This confusion meant the vast
majority of Anatolians were illiterate. Ottoman Turkish was artificial. Gökalp aptly
viewed language a linguistic science (p. 267). Başgöz points out, Arabic in particular,
was problematic as one word had various meanings. ‫ ﻙكﻭوﺭرﻙك‬could mean, kürk (fur), kürek
(shovel), gevrek (crisp), görek (let us see), gürk (brooder) and görk (prettiness) (p. 212).
Yılmaz Çolak (2004) discusses the political use of language in the formative
years of the Republic. Language reform, for the pragmatists was to be revolutionary not
‘evolutionary’ (p. 76). ‘Turkish language came to symbolize a conversion from
imperial-religious to national-secular culture’. For Çolak it was a ‘revolution’ through
the ‘scientification of language’ inspired by Kemalist ‘positivism’ (p. 68). Considering
Veblen’s ideas on how industry influences language to make it more ‘matter-of-fact’, in
the Turkish case, adopting the Latin alphabet had similar implications or perhaps
prepared a road toward industrialization that would require clear everyday language use.
‘Turkish’ produced more matter-of-fact thought to circumvent misunderstanding in the
Arabic example above. This process was explained to Linke, on a school visit. ‘One
compared the old and new alphabet and showed that formerly sixteen Arabic letters
were needed to denote what could now be expressed by a simple Latin z’ (AD 215-216).
People needed to be educated and enlightened through ‘a common language that
ordinary people could easily understand’. With this aim, ‘Ottoman Turkish had to be
corrected by putting a strong emphasis on everyday language’ (Çolak p. 69).
Newspapers using this ordinary, easy to understand language refers to what Benedict
Anderson calls ‘print capitalism’, that sees one common language the essential element
of a nation (p. 69). Turkists like Ömer Seyfeddin and Ziya Gökalp led this ‘language
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movement’; Yeni Lisan (New Language) in the evolution from Empire to Republic (p.
69). The movement did meet opposition like that from Kazım Karabekir because he saw
Latin characters as ‘harmful for the unity of Islam’ (p. 70). In 1924 there was debate in
the parliament regarding the subject. Şükrü Saraçoğlu, during a session on the budget
for the ministry of national education, voiced a similar opinion to those of Hüseyin
Cahit and Kılıçzade Hakkı at the Izmir Economic Conference (February-March 1923)
that a new script would lift people out of ‘ignorance and illiteracy’ (p. 70). Publishing
articles on the topic, they took a very different view to Karabekir. Intellectual and
political circles followed the debate. Latin script would be a luminary path out of the
‘darkness of Arabic script’ (p. 71). Despite lively intellectual debate, language reform
went ahead.
Aware many adults were uneducated Mustafa Kemal introduced a new law in
1928 to eradicate illiteracy and harness ‘knowledge for a better life’ (Başgöz p. 119). In
May that year, the Language Committee Latinized Ottoman script and worked on new
grammar (Çolak p. 72). Nation schools (Millet Mektepleri) established compulsory
adult education (p. 72). All citizens, male and female aged between 15 and 45 attended
courses (Başgöz p. 120). By August 1928, five thousand teachers—learning the new
alphabet in just four months—taught 220,000 adult students (p. 86-87). In one year
Osmanlıca was phased out. ‘These meetings opened a campaign which quickly became
nationwide’ according to Başgöz, ‘with Atatürk serving somewhat in the role of
schoolmaster. He travelled to selected cities and, with the use of the blackboard,
explained the new script in the coffee houses, in schools and in open-air meetings’ (p.
86). Pro-reformer Mustafa Sekip stated: ‘We have no time to listen to such objections
insistently point out to us the risk which our culture and tradition may run. The foremost
thing in our minds is the present and the future. Let those who are fond of the past,
remain in the past’ (Çolak p. 72-73). ‘[S]uperstitious and scholastic’ knowledge, as
another pro-reformist Celal Nuri wrote is ‘inadequate to meet today’s cultural needs’.
Çolak stresses the ‘emancipatory’ aspects of the new alphabet by positioning ‘Turks in
life and science’ (p. 73). But more than this, it was an ‘act of forgetting’ and closing a
chapter on the past that would free them from chaotic ‘old values’ (p. 74). Turkish
would be ‘intelligently cultivated’ as Sadri Maksudi expressed in Türk Dili İçin (For the
Turkish Language) (p. 75). Thus, Turkish was the vital institution upon which to knit
the nation together. It was not a unique practice to Turkey, European nations were
constructed through language, and as illustrated above, so was Canada. Veblen believed
groups united around language. Language was a means to knit the nation together and
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keep it distinct from neighboring Arab polities—exploited by British and French
colonialism—and Iran. A once porous frontier in the empire was no more. The gaze was
directed west not eastward. The people at that time appear to have embraced the new
reform. In fact, language united common man in a kind of Freirean word=work=praxis
whereby the act of learning became a shared experience of solidarity or even
emancipatory praxis. Arriving some eight years after the reform, Linke’s narrative
clarifies their act of sharing.
Even hard-boiled foreigners, who were living in Turkey at the time, found it difficult to describe
adequately the wave of enthusiasm and democratic spirit which swept the country. In mosques,
coffee-houses, tram-cars, on the kerb, people were bending over sheets of paper, trying to draw
the new letters. […] Masters and servants, old and young, sat side by side on the school benches
(AD 215).
Specifically at the time language reform was underway a French visitor, Eugene Pittard,
traveled across the entirety of Anatolia, even to the eastern city of Diyarbakır, and drew
a similar conclusion to Linke. ‘I went from Ankara to Diyarbakir, from Sivas to Konya.
I stopped in every village and town; I witnessed the zeal that the entire population felt,
and the enthusiasm of young and old was impressive’ (Pittard cited in Başgöz p. 86).
Perhaps what was most impressive is that everyone was included without regard
of superior or inferior, subordinate or insubordinate. It might have had a great unifying
effect. Visiting a government tobacco factory in Samsun, Linke experienced language
reform firsthand as both old and young women factory workers could write in Turkish.
She was about eighteen, with raven-black bobbed hair and a comely figure. Not in the least shy,
she wrote in large Latin letters: Hadiye Yildiz. […] And then she asked politely for my name
and wrote it letter after letter as I spelt it (AD 162).102
At the same tobacco factory, the mayor of Samsun explained educational programs for
the workers. Linke was ‘deeply surprised’. He told her:
We always organize obligatory courses in reading, writing and general knowledge during the
winter months. They have five lessons a week, half an hour during working time and half an
hour during their own free time. Two girls who joined us as illiterates are now employed in our
offices (AD 162).
When we recall Ottoman Empire problems with education and ethnic privileges, where
only non-Muslim women worked at Régie for example, the reasoning of Mustafa
Kemal and his peers worked to cultivate a unified education system that built better
lives for women in their evolution from illiterates to literates. Canadian educators
(government policy) aim to teach English to the immigrants would mean ‘safety and
102
Owing to typesetting limitations Yildiz is spelled Yıldız in Turkish without the ‘i’ dotted.
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happiness’ for the nation, so too, it applied in the Turkish context. Linke’s experiences
corroborate with Başgöz’s when he referred to the curiosity and delight of Turkish
students embracing the chance to learn in a rural setting.
One of the students has malaria. Salih, the veterinarian, took a sample of his blood and showed
the malaria microbe under a microscope to the other students. It was quite an experience to see
these students peering through a microscope for the first time. One of them cried: ‘If anyone had
sworn by God had told me such things as microbes existed, I’d never have believed him. But
now I can see them with my own eyes, and wriggling their tails like tadpoles, too’ (p. 145-46).
Despite financial obstacles Linke informed her reader: ‘Education in Turkey is
free of any charge, even in boarding schools only those pay for their keep whose parents
can afford it, and they are not known to anyone but the head master’ (AD 219). Their
discretion toward income imbalances was wise so as not to create feelings of inferiority
or superiority between students but to treat them all equal. Linke received a textbook as
a gift from a female fifteen year-old student Perihan, with a dedication addressed to her.
We shall educate our children in a way which makes them capable of using their brains even in
unaccustomed circumstances, of taking necessary decisions without waiting for orders from
above, of developing a spirit of enterprise and a desire to overcome all difficulties which may
block their way (AD 221).
The phrase ‘spirit of enterprise’ seems to contradict ideals of ‘common good’
particularly if we read ‘enterprise’ the way Veblen read it. Again, we must consider the
‘third way’ Turkey chose to pursue. ‘Enterprise’ has two implications in this case. First
to be an enterprising student, implies being an ambitious and hardworking one. Second
to be well educated, implies working as an industrious person for the national economy.
Turkish pragmatism realized ‘enterprise’ would be essential to the nation but at this
conjuncture it was not the ‘pecuniary gain’ of exploitative business but rather
‘enterprise’ to build the national economy along the principles of a ‘mixed economy’
and Étatism mentioned earlier. Individuals must be confident and independent and
unfettered by history and memories of the past. Linke made this point explicitly clear.
‘She was already a whole generation ahead of me, a generation not troubled with
memories and sufferings of the war or the confusion of Europe on which she had turned
her back. […] She was very clear-headed, independent, optimistic, and had very definite
plans for building up a happy future not only for herself, but for the whole of Turkey’
(AD 222). Dewey’s notion of ‘interaction’ and ‘continuity’ in learning helped Linke see
anew where Europe erred. She was, like Cesar postulated, ‘work[ing] out these attitudes
in an internal process’ located in her Turkish experiences that offered a chance to learn.
Hence, rather than an ill-willed search for ethnic division she wrote of collective
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pedagogical praxis and ‘experiential learning’ at Gazi primary school (İlk Mekteb) in
the eastern provincial city of Malatya.
All forty boys and girls between twelve and thirteen crowded the benches, all dressed in grey
overalls with little white collars. A girl with a long plait, an exception today even in a Turkish
town, stood behind the teacher’s desk. The teacher himself, a middle-aged man, had taken her
seat at the back and was listening with the children. They were having an arithmetic lesson. […]
The method of letting the pupils alternately take the place of the teacher had once been
employed in the most progressive German schools, but it made me smile to think that my own
had never risen to such new-fangled experiments and that Asia Minor was more advanced than
East Berlin (AD 212-213).
In hindsight, we might better appreciate the aims of Turkish educators to focus on ‘one
language, one culture, one ideal’. Having already experienced the ‘odious idea of racial
purity’ (AD 10) in Weimar, Linke’s narratives present us with a position from which to
assess the new pedagogical praxis of education. Turkish pedagogy had little in common
with the German pathology of a ‘superior’ race, one Volk, treating its others as
foreigners. In the Ottoman Empire there was also no notion of race or racialist policies.
This habituation was carried over into the Republic. Kemal Karpat points out:
Historically, racialism had no roots in Turkey; few countries in the world are less suitable to
racialism than Turkey. The country’s population is a mixture of those races which have
populated Anatolia since time immemorial, and which have mixed freely with each other for
centuries—the Circassians, Albanians, Bosnians, Kurds, Georgians, and, by way of conversion
to Islam and marriage, the Greeks, Armenians, and Slavs. Thus there was left very little of the
purity of blood that the racialists (themselves of very dubious origins) tried to claim (1959: 26869).
In a recent article, İlker Aytürk addresses current scholarship that condemns Kemalism
and the founding elite for ‘exclusionary strategems which targeted non-Muslims and
assimilationist policies against the Muslim minority groups’ (2011: 310). Apparently
there were pockets of racist critics, like Nihâl Atsız in the 1930s, who blamed Atatürk
and early Republican rulers for doing just the opposite (2011: 310). Atatürk never left a
fully worked-out doctrine or ideology for the RPP. The nature of Kemalism still
continues to ‘perplex scholars’ (p. 311). After his death, statesmen and scholars alike
have reinvented Kemalism manipulating it for their benefit (Heper 1980: 65-82).
Linke’s reading of the aims of the Republican leaders has understood their
approach was distinctly different from that of the Nazis.
Militarism and a nationalist education, and one political party led by a deified man—why had I
left Nazi Germany if I accepted these things here without protest? Because they had a different
meaning and were done in a different spirit. Because Turkey wants to reach unity by education,
where Germany upholds it by terrorizing force. Because Turkish nationalism widens the world
for millions of people from a primitive village to a self-possessed country, German nationalism
narrows it from an important part of the civilized world to a fanatically goose-stepping state.
Because the Crescent and Star will never be carried in a hostile spirit beyond Turkey’s frontiers
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whilst the Swastika, if no one summons up the spirit to check it, will soon wave over a shellholed Europe (AD 219-220).
Certainly the Malatya middle school differed greatly from Linke’s ‘War School 19141918’ in Restless Days. Turkish pedagogy ‘widens the world’ for millions in the nation.
Common ‘Going to the People’
The philosophy of ‘going to the people’ that Gökalp had so passionately argued
for was revisited in the 1930s. Gökalp outlined the difference between civilization and
culture. ‘The élites are the carriers of civilization and the people the holders of culture’
(1959: 259). Therefore, ‘going to the people’ was a means of reciprocal learning, ‘to
receive a training in culture from the people and to carry civilization to them’ (p. 259).
Reciprocity would assimilate the elites with the villagers and the villagers with the
élites. He thought the elites could learn from Anatolian traditions of ‘wit and wisdom’
and note their ‘mode of thinking and their style of feeling’ through poetry, folk-tales,
shadow play (karagöz), open-air plays (ortaoyunu), music and dance (p. 259). In short,
‘going to the people’ was a method to evolve national culture. Gökalp realized early on
this unsolved gap was necessary to bridge, therefore, ‘going to the people’ was central
to his pedagogical philosophy.
In many ways Linke embodied the ideas of pioneering Turkish pedagogues,
Gökalp, Baltacıoğlu and Ülken. I suggest Linke’s ‘tender empiricist’ way of seeing
ignored such division. She had little inhibition about journeying to remote areas in
Anatolia, due to childhood habituation and experiences with peasant Prussians. I
suggest her story works to bridge the gap between urban elites (civilization) and rural
peasants (culture) for those willing to see anew her following implicit message.
I remembered too well the warnings of some cynical friends at Istanbul and their descriptions of
the Turks as lazy, self-seeking, materially minded, uneducated and corrupt. But slowly, under
the weight of growing evidence, I began to doubt my friends’ impartiality (AD 59).
Evidently some elites habitually viewed the rural populace as inferior. Intelligentsia in
the early 1930s had grown tired of the word ‘revolution’ and were disinclined to ‘go to
the people’ (Karaömerlioğlu 1998b: 69). Additionally, the reason for their cynicism
stemmed from the horrors of social unrest in Europe, rearmament, deepening
Depression and anticipation of another war. Genuine efforts of ‘going to the people’ had
already been attempted after WWI, when fifteen medical doctors—one of whom was
Reşit Galip—formed the Peasantist Association (Köycüler Cemiyeti) to provide medical
assistance and help the peasantry overcome hardships (p. 72).
Linke was not habituated to resentful habits of thought against the Turks. As a
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European woman, she herself was a subject of emulation (perceived superior in
Turkey), even though she was a pauperized individual (perceived inferior in Germany,
France and Britain). She hoped to learn from the Turks. The fact they viewed Linke a
figure to emulate and she viewed them figures for emulation, represents an unspoken
irony of reciprocal exchange in their encounters, each looking to learn from each other.
Linke recounted an instance when this occurred, when she found herself between a
group of women and children, looking at her with ‘curious amazement’ and a Major
who talked to them in a ‘fatherly voice’ and said: ‘Learn to read and write, keep
yourselves clean and tidy, wake up out of your slavery, work for your living, and you
will get nice dresses, intelligent husbands, beautiful children and the whole world to
roam about in’ (AD 71-72). Linke was used as a role model to emulate, from whom
these women were to learn, in this case.
Although Turkey was her own master, the newfound confidence of her
pragmatists produced a two-fold habit of needing to prove the nation equal to Europe,
on the one hand, and a habit (based out of necessity) to prove the legitimacy of the
nation in the eyes of its citizens, on the other. Every practice became an opportunity to
teach citizens. Linke subtly touched on the subject when shown around the eastern city
of Erzurum, noting a taint of resentment directed at Europe in the remarks of a Major.
‘Just to show people here new methods of construction, and to prove to the foreigners that they
are not the only ones who can do such things,’ said the major, pointing at the yellow façade of
the new college for teachers, the first concrete building in the Turkish east (AD 68).
Her experience documents the aims and good intentions—born out of necessity—the
RPP and Turkish pragmatists put into practice to educate future teachers having erected
a teacher’s college institution in the east.
In 1937, Mustafa Kemal would announce that the Republic be divided into three
main regions for progressive tertiary education: Istanbul, Ankara and Van (Başgöz p.
169). The vigour and enthusiasm in which Turkish pioneers built new educational
institutions is testament to their spirit of workmanship. But inspiring this enthusiasm in
common man had to be provoked in some cases. In reference to the building of village
schools, based on a real need to encourage citizens to be ‘self-reliant’ individuals, Bay
Faruk told her:
No, I think for some time to come we must leave it as it is: the Government build the secondary
schools, the vilayet the primary schools, and the villages are responsible for the village schools.
We need that willingness to do something for the communal benefit. Too long has each peasant
only thought of himself. Besides, the Government are now suggesting that, if necessary, several
villages should set to work together and build a school, perhaps even a simple boarding-school,
between them (AD 210-211).
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Old Ottoman habit taught peasants to rely on the state to solve all their problems. It
seems plausible some did not understand or appreciate what was expected of them or
how they were to contribute to the Republic. Although ‘willingness’ of the people was
expected in 1935, Linke caught this contradiction and questioned the reader: ‘Where
could they get the money from’ (AD 210)?
Anticipating possible alienation of common man from the RPP and social unrest
like in Europe, in 1931 Mustafa Kemal closed the Türk Ocakları (Turkish Hearth
Clubs), claiming that they were out of touch with the people, and opened the Halkevi
(People’s House) in 1932 to knit the people closer together and raise standards for the
youth (Başgöz p. 151). Karpat saw the measure a political goal to persuade the
countryside to accept the new political principles of Republicanism in the form of
‘Turkish nationalism’ as a ‘modern political identity’ and ‘new religion’. As an
educational goal, the Halkevi aimed to teach the masses the six-arrow principles,
eradicate illiteracy and raise economic standards. As a cultural goal the Halkevi
reproduced the authenticity of Turkishness (Karpat 1974: 69). As an economic goal it
hoped to teach the people self-reliance through ‘experiential learning’. But Tanrıöver,
director of the closed Turkish Hearths, accused the RPP of totalitarian tactics as in
Germany and Soviet Russia (Karaömerlioğlu 2014: 58).
Fay Kirby argued the elite that frequented Halkevi acted like ‘foreign tourists
who try to discover the dark corners of Africa’ (Karaömerlioğlu 1998a: 59).
Karaömerlioğlu thought the institutions impacted urban intellectuals more than peasants
(1998b: 71-72). Despite criticism, through ‘trial and error the Houses gradually began to
play the great educational role for which they had been created’ (Karpat 1963: 66),
especially in the area of communication (Karpat 1974). Buğra articulates the vision of
the RPP a rational means to prevent the ‘dissolution of the village economy’ (2007: 40).
Wisely, the ‘meeting place was to be the village and not the city’ (p. 41)
Opening of the Halkevi was timely. Across the world, there was a renewed focus
on rural and agricultural life in the 1930s, little different in Turkey. Cooperation
between the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Agriculture proved advantageous to
further agricultural education. İsmail Hakkı Tonguç, the son of a poor Bulgarian peasant
family and former colleague of Necati, initiated new teacher training for the villages in
1932-33. Patriotic and passionate about social justice, Tonguç perceived himself an
educator rather than a teacher. He believed rural rehabilitation should integrate teachers
into the village economy (Başgöz p. 137). Cooperatives sold local produce at fair prices
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and became an incentive for villagers ‘experiential learning’. The Ministry of
Agriculture supplied seeds in place of salaries, farm implements and credit for the
teacher’s own farm unit (p. 143). ‘The essential aim of these lessons was to develop a
practical, responsible individual who was well respected in his own village’ (p. 147).
Başgöz recounts a story on the Mahmudiye State Farm (Eskişehir) in 1936 from the
Director’s weekly report at the Ministry of Education.
This week the students were set to work on baling machines. These machines were said by
experts to produce one bale in ten minutes. To the expert’s surprise, the students managed the
operation in four minutes. Afterward, a mechanic took the machine apart and asked the students
whether they could reassemble it. They did it to perfection. […] Building classes have been
started this week. The students have been divided into four groups, which work every day on the
new school building. After the day’s work, the students examine the plans, listen to explanations
and are given lessons in arithmetic (p. 146).
In 1935 at the Mardin Halkevi Mustafa Kemal’s intention was appreciated, in that, the
‘dignity’ of the peasants had been raised (Karpat 1963: 66). In the Freirean sense, this
educational initiative hoped to ‘recover their lost humanity’. Self-reliance in work gave
common man a sense of purpose. This early educational experiment led to the opening
of the Village Institutes (Köy Enstitüleri) in 1937.
Linke wrote a chapter entitled ‘Halkevi’, visiting almost a dozen on her journey
(AD 175), as they existed across the Republic even in remote eastern regions like
Elazığ. Lectures were given twice a month on ‘political and legal reforms, hygiene, land
cultivation, education, crop raising and animal breeding, administrative organization
and national defense’ (Karpat 1974: 79). Linke, commenting on the democratic ethos of
the Halkevi, experienced a somewhat different institution than that related by the critics
above. ‘No age-limit is fixed, no distinctions are made between men and women,
cobblers and pharmacists, factory girls and idle ladies, and the illiterate is as welcome
as the head master is as good as obliged to take an active part’ (AD 169). Here, there
seems to be no superior-inferior dichotomy, as Linke’s Istanbul friends seemed to
harbor. Everyone was welcome. A young orphaned boy Ömer, the first in his school
form, had been taken in by the Samsun Halkevi (AD 170) and was learning the violin.
Volunteers were of all ages: lycée student, middle-aged female elementary school
teacher, a dentist, and elderly man (AD 172). The president was a lawyer volunteering
in the evenings (AD 171). Volunteers informed peasants about new institutions
available to them—hospitals, law courts, schools and committees—and encouraged
their participation (AD 173). Volunteers travelled around the province and helped
peasants settle debts, provide free legal advice and tend to health issues. Seven days a
week there were activities and lessons held at Halkevi: lessons in drama, reading and
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writing for adults, language classes (English, French, German), Turkish history, choir
practice, women’s dressmaking, gymnasium groups, Turkish language and art classes,
book-binding and handicrafts. Also there was a football club, drama group and museum
and exhibition committee (AD 171-172).
The Ankara Halkevi was responsible for publishing the Halkevi journal titled
Ideal (Ülkü) (Karpat 1974: 71) and Folklore News (Halk Bilgisi Haberleri) (p. 75).
Publications wrote studies about social groups, craftsmen, religious sects, nomadic
tribes and customs, agricultural methods, art and practical solutions for rural problems.
The journal was an important ‘media of communication’ and source of education by
encouraging book publishing and founding of libraries and conferences. By 1940 Ülkü
reported 4,533 lectures were delivered to 1,282,824 listeners (p. 79). The publication
stimulated interest in ‘writing, journalism and reporting’ (p. 70). Villagers wanted to
read about themselves. The practice reflected Dewey’s philosophy. ‘All communication
is like art’ and is a central praxis of education (1916/1980: 9). ‘Communication is the
process of creating participation, of making common what had been isolated and
singular; and part of the miracle it achieves is that, in being communicated, the
conveyance of meaning gives body and definiteness to the experience of the one who
utters as well as to that of those who listen’ (1934/1989: 248-49). Ülkü used simple
everyday language and for Karpat was a turning point in Turkish intellectual life as ‘it
marked the reorientation towards concrete images connected with life and reality’
(Karpat 1974: 74). Here, we encounter Veblen’s matter-of-fact knowledge that produces
clear thought, in this case, a result of language reform. Karpat saw it a necessary break
from the formalism of divan literature (p. 74). Ülkü was a laboratory for young writers
like Yaşar Kemal (1923-2015)—Adana Halkevi member and tobacco worker—who
blossomed into one of Turkey’s most influential writers.
Talat, a young member of the Samsun Halkevi, told Linke a story about an
elderly peasant man of eighty who didn’t understand he could not use his son’s
identification as his own. The angry man argued: ‘What does it matter? There’s no
difference. Aren’t they all given out by the Government?’ Rather than ridiculing him for
not understanding what was expected of him, Linke subtly remarked about the story:
They all laughed, unable to understand the bewilderment of a poor old man who had found
himself suddenly caught by the wheels of a mysterious machine. And yet it was not so long since
they themselves had learnt how to handle it (AD 175).
Linke’s previous experience and learning from the Weimar Inflation, had too, created a
populace not knowing the ‘mysterious machine’. Through ‘continuity’ in learning, her
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way of seeing (Anschauen) and intuition (Anschauungen) allowed Linke to form a
rational (Vernunft) synthesis, such that, the Turks needn’t laugh at the old man because,
they too, had just learned the ‘mysterious machine’ (although Turkish inflation was no
comparision to that of Weimar). She abstained from taking sides either with the peasant
or Talat. I read this nuance as Linke’s articulation of creating a bridge rather than a gap
between the urban elite and rural peasant that undermines the superior-inferior
dichotomy.
In sum, a ‘bricolage’ of foreign and local pedagogies became a blueprint for
Turkish education. Gökalp’s idealism envisioned Turkish culture a science;
Baltacıoğlu’s pragmatism trusted in art and theatre; Ülken’s moral philosophy called for
ethics as one needed to sow good seeds to harvest a knowledgeable and purposeful
future generation. They largely agreed on Dewey’s ‘experiential learning’. ‘Man’s life
is activity; and as he acts, so he thinks and feels’ (Veblen 1934/1964: 85). Turkish
common man were not ‘lazy and self-seeking’ but dynamic. If their dynamism had
waned it was the result of war and poverty cumulated across the nineteenth century that
robbed them of their dignity. The pragmatists intensified (Goethe’s Steigerung) their
aims such that the whole (nation) flourish, despite the obstacles. Educational reform,
even if only partially successful at revolutionizing the countryside, was a great learning
for Linke that surely influenced her later work in Ecuador. She took Turkish praxis with
her to underdeveloped regions of the Andes to work with and for the Quechua and
Ecuador’s common man. Linke had learned from the people of Turkey and as a means
of reciprocal exchange, wrote her story as a gift for them.103 In Linke, we see an
actualization of Dewey’s ‘knowledge of life’, in her praxis of ‘learning from all the
contacts of life’ as an ‘essential moral interest’ in her aim Turkey succeed. Both the
people of Turkey and Linke shared a common spirit of insubordination in that they both
worked for the betterment of the whole under exceedingly trying circumstances. 103
I do not know who or how many read Allah Dethroned at the time other than findings in book reviews.
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—Chapter 7—
‘Instinct of Workmanship’
The Turkish Case
Home truth three: Remember you can neither change your
roots nor transplant them. So be proud of them. Relish them.
—Moris Farhi (2007: 436)
In a country where poverty is everyone’s lot, money cannot
be made the condition of success.
—Lilo Linke (SCT 551)
Biz çalışacağız (We will work). —Mustafa Kemal
Linke was a witness to ‘instinct of workmanship’ that resurfaced within Turkey just as
the Great Depression (1929-1939) engulfed the globe. This chapter examines
workmanship as a facilitator of cultural evolution. Under exceedingly challenging
circumstances, Mustafa Kemal and his peers knit the nation together with work for
betterment of the whole. But how could a nation with 81 percent agricultural production
(Makal 1999: 38) evolve into a self-sufficient industrialized nation? Where would they
find a skilled workforce? From whom would they borrow ideas? How does working
toward a common goal change cultural habits? Turkey’s economic recovery under
Étatism (state-owned industry) was unmatched elsewhere in the east Mediterranean
(Pamuk 2000: 18). I suggest strong parallels existed between Linke’s ‘experiential
learning’ and ‘instinct of workmanship’ within Turkey. Experiencing this workmanship,
as ‘spirit of insubordination’, her narratives juxtapose progressive yet contradictory
ways in which goals were realized. Resembling Goethe’s scientific method ‘tender
empiricism’, Linke’s way of seeing written as ‘matter-of-fact knowledge’ appreciated
their efforts and, what appeared to her as success at reclaiming their dignity.
In the 1920s as European nations squabbled over WWI war reparations and
carving up the spoils there was little interest in helping Turkey because under the
auspices of former Ottoman customs tariffs, no imports from or exports to Britain,
France, Italy, Japan, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia were allowed until 24 August
1928 (Tuna 2009: 19). The measure crippled Turkey’s early start at industrialization. At
the Izmir Economic Congress (17 February to 4 March 1923), Mustafa Kemal outlined
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Turkey’s ‘national economy’ program. Minister of Finance Mahmut Esat stressed:
We do not resemble any school in the history of economics. We are neither from the laissez faire
school nor socialist, communist, étatist or any other protectionist schools... Although we are not
bound to any of these schools mentioned above, we will not fail to make use of them, when
necessary for the country. New Turkey should maintain a mixed economy system (p. 21).
Relations would be structured on alliances between tradesmen and industrialists,
workers and civil servants, and traders and the self-employed. A comprehensive plan
was put in place to realize these goals, that would,
distribute print literature to the villagers; teach primary and secondary schools industrial and
agricultural courses; primary level education institutions were to have boarding schools adjacent
to a large plot of land to teach theoretical and applied agricultural instruction; secondary schools
were to establish model farms; establish a national agricultural college in Ankara with bee hives,
vegetable gardens, orchards, dairy, brewery production which students were to manage; teachers
were to supervise and sell produce which would pay teacher salaries; teachers were encouraged
to live in the village; all male and female graduates from foreign and Turkish high schools were
to serve one year on farms; military training was to include agricultural instruction; form mobile
schools for adult education (Başgöz 1968: 56-57).
Many of these ambitious plans were not implemented until the 1930s but represent an
early aim to work for betterment of the whole. With the Depression, the focus shifted to
national unity against possible antagonist struggle between groups. In Tuna’s words:
‘By ensuring social solidarity over class struggle, this premise is aimed to create
harmony in alliances, and will help equalize occupational alliances in accordance with
the degree of ones talent and efforts’ (p. 99). Mustafa Kemal stated: ‘The party [RPP]
will represent the nation as a whole, not just one social class’ (Atatürk cited in Başgöz
1968: 47).
Mustafa Kemal and his peers created a ‘third way’ (üçüncü yol)—neither
capitalist nor communist—as the national aspiration for economic independence and
sovereignty (Adivar 1928; Birtek 1985; Heper and Keyman 1998; Tuna 2009). In some
ways, I equate their ‘third way’ to that of Linke. Although she recognized that social
justice lay somewhere on the Left, she was cautious not to give herself blindly to one
ideology, but instead rested in-between, rejecting communism and capitalism outright.
In this manner she created her own Weltanschauung of what ‘ought to be’, as was the
aim of the leadership and its supporters within Turkey.
The Great Depression incited widespread civil unrest in Europe. In 1932,
Germany had six million unemployed (Stolper 1940); in 1934 riots broke out in Paris
(Dell 2007); and by 1936 Spain was in civil war (Bates 1936). Even rural enclaves in
Canada were not immune. When six hundred open pit coalminers went on strike in
Bienfait, Saskatchewan in 1931, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) opened
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fire on men, women and children, wounding over fifty and killing three coalminers
(Endicott 2002). The Turkish government watched events unfold in Europe with great
concern. Economic hardship in Turkey worsened further and the populace was getting
restless. Mustafa Kemal and his peers journeyed three months across Anatolia (1931) to
meet common man and learn about the experiences and problems they faced firsthand
(Başar 1945).
In 1932, the RPP announced the Six Arrow (Altı Ok) program and the first of
two five-year plans for industrial development. Linke published the Six Arrow poster in
her book (AD 329, Plate XLIII). I briefly review the six terms: republicanism,
nationalism, populism, revolutionism, secularism and étatism that became the pillars of
what later came to be known as Kemalist ideology. Paul Dumont (1984) writing on the
origins of Kemalism unpacked each term. Republicanism (Cumhuriyetçilik) or
République was inspired from the French Revolution and equated with democracy (p.
26). Nationalism (Milliyetçilik)—previously religious community (millet)—defined
nation as ‘a social and political formation comprising citizens linked together by the
community of language, culture and ideal’ (p. 29). Populism (Halkçılık) borrowed from
the Russian narodniki or ‘going to the people’—a term coined by Yusuf Akçura (18761935) and later popularized by Ziya Gökalp—was the ‘Turkish version of the solidarist
ideas [cooperative solidarism] outlined by the French radical politician Léon Bourgeois
and the sociologist Emile Durkheim’ (p. 31). Revolutionism (İnkılapçılık) from the
Ottoman inkilab or ihtilal, meaning a sudden change in political or social order or
islahat social metamorphosis, denoted continuous revolution to rapidly advance the
nation (p. 35). Secularism (Layiklik) from the French laïcité—separation of church and
state—in the Turkish case meant religion be kept a private affair separate from
government (p. 36). Religion was not banned outright. Étatism (Devletçilik) ensured the
government control the process of industrialization in the interest of national
development (p. 39). While a far-reaching program imposed from above cannot be
completely democratic, within the historical context, putting people to work was
definitely more progressive and peaceable—even a radical political act—over predatory
exploits in Europe toward a race for rearmament and cancerous fascism. Linke’s
workmanship through authorship cultivated empathy with the Turks as a peaceable and
industrious nation and, was equally, a radical political act.
Veblen’s ‘Instinct of Workmanship’
The ‘instinct of workmanship’ is part of the ‘spirit of insubordination’ where
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common man work within their means for common good of the community and not
under undue pressure, surveillance or intervention from above. They are self-conscious
agents that set ‘teleological’ activities for themselves. ‘He is an agent seeking in every
act the accomplishment of some concrete, objective, impersonal end. By force of his
being such an agent he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and distaste for futile
effort’ (1899/2009: 16). Habituation to the community is a quasi-anarchistic form of
‘Live and Let Live’. Based on this definition, how then, could top down Étatism
possibly be considered ‘Live and Let Live’ of common man? My argument seems
porous even implausible. In the Turkish case, Étatism was the state-led attempt to
motivate common man to work for the good of the community—community which
embodies the entire Republic—without foreign intervention for the betterment of the
whole (nation). The spirit of volunteerism to flourish against obstacles became the
national ethos. When we recall Jameson’s philosophy that people must take an active
role in their community to bring about social progress (Golubov 2002: 9), Turkey’s
concrete praxis of work interwoven with the new abstract concept of citizen and nation
makes complete rational sense. In this respect, Étatism was praxis to help restore the
people’s confidence whose industriousness and human dignity was robbed by the
‘strong hand’ of imperialism and it was a means of protecting the state in the
Depression years (Okyar 1965; Birtek 1985). State-lead industry marked a clear intent
for long-term betterment of the whole over parasitic profit for profits sake of business.
Pertinently aware of the practices of rather unscrupulous individuals within
Turkey, Yakup Kadri a diplomat, journalist and novelist, read the economic crisis as a
means for business-like individuals to found factories to their advantage, who tend to, travel in committees to either Austria, Germany or to Czechoslovakia, where they spent weeks
or months, acting as if they were there to explore new gold mines and ended up with the
factories they sent back home like financial trophies; god knows under what onerous
circumstances or with what high commissions they gained them in the first place. Immediately
following this, national companies were established and the same businessmen turned up as
shareholders in them, sometimes members or even the chairman of the board, seemingly finding
the secret to get the gold mine home, which they explored abroad. We heard of some messed up
with even more entangled business, like, selling second hand machinery from textile factories to
other countries, which only recently, were transported to Turkish ports, to be used at home (p.
291).
Kadri writes with certain disgust about this opportunism. Linke will visit both private
and state-run industry later in the chapter. Étatism differed from economic schemes
employed abroad (Okyar 1965; Birtek 1985). ‘In Turkey, government interventionism
was not designed, in the Keynesian sense, to increase aggregate demand through the use
of devaluations and expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. Instead, the emphasis
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was on creating a more closed, more autarkic [self-sufficient] economy and increasing
central control through the expansion of the public sector’ (Pamuk 2000: 18).
Announced prior to the United States New Deal (1933-1938) Turkey took the lead.
Mustafa Kemal and his peers were not career politicians. Perhaps pioneers, they
might have envisioned how the nation evolve. To explore this subject further, I borrow
Faruk Birtek’s model of Étatism (1985). In the Étatist period beginning in 1932, the
core (state bureaucrats) had to efficiently manage two existing modes of production.
Agricultural production (periphery) some of which was run by feudal landlords holding
large tracts of land, particularly in the south east of Turkey, on the one hand, and
already existent private enterprises carried over from the liberal economy (1923 to
1930), on the other. Adding to this mix, with efforts to industrialize the nation they
worked to insert new industries that were state-run and state-owned industrial
enterprises, manufacturing textiles, paper, metal, glass and chemicals, to name a few.
Regulating all these modes of production meant that the bureaucrats in the core had to
ensure capital accumulation not be skimmed off directly into private pockets but rather
channeled toward developing and building the nation; i.e. schools, hospitals, railways,
roads, bridges, infrastructure and the like. It required breaking old habits established in
the last two centuries of the Ottoman Empire. Certainly, it was not an easy task. They
would face conflicts of interest between these various modes of production and the
actors involved. Yet, the goal was to work for the future by envisioning the possible.
Birtek explains their vision and governance. ‘Here the rationality that
determined behavior competence was the functional rationality of ‘cost accounting’ (p.
408). Their aims were to rationally manage the populace, economically. Thus, the
‘Étatist economic program was a ‘prudent financial policy’ that ‘hinged on keeping a
balanced budget’ (p. 412) such that national development would flourish. From a multiperspectival angle, these bureaucrats’ goals might be seen as determined benevolent
fathers ensuring all the children of the nation are working and fed rather than belligerent
politicians that pocket the money for self-interest. They were not masters of ‘financial
intrigue’ like in the U.S. Instead, they ‘controlled the direction of growth of the
economic surplus’, both through cultivating better wheat production as a ‘nationalmarket-oriented activity’ (p. 409) and constructing industrial manufacture. This explains
the importance of railway construction as it ensured the transportation of wheat across
the nation to feed people. Of Veblen’s cumulative ‘native bias’, peculiar to each culture,
it seems rather futile to argue Turkey was equal in mindset to Germany or Russia.
Raised in German ‘native bias’, who better than Linke to appreciate this difference.
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Turkey’s Masterless Women
Habit of thought might harbor the prejudice that Turkish women are somehow
‘behind’ European women. Production in Turkey was tied to agriculture thus an
organized and industrial workforce—inclusive of women—was on the way to
becoming. Anatolian women always worked although not in fully industrial work in the
western sense of a proletariat. They worked on çift-hane farms and in small units of
artisanal production for centuries and millenniums. Women were not subjects of the
harem, a misconception reproduced under the Western Oriental gaze (Ahmed 1982;
Yeğenoğlu 1998; Mabro 1998). Women had yet to reach economic independence
although some had made great strides in this area.
American culture swept across the last vestiges of the Ottoman Empire. Women
wore the latest flapper fashions just like their European contemporaries, were seduced
as new consumers and learned the new habit of consumption. Skirts were raised and
hats were donned. Bobbed haircuts became the rage known as Rus başı (literally
Russian head for their short bobbed hair worn with a thin band around the head)
following the influx of Russian émigrés into the Ottoman Empire following WWI and
the Bolshevik Revolution. Advertising for every kind of new fancy adorned the pages of
Turkish fashion magazines. Women attended sporting events alongside men. While
some became avid consumers, countless women worked for betterment of the whole,
which in the Étatist period, was the aim to develop local industries producing goods
common man needed as there was widespread poverty following the war. Imports
undermined the national economy because it hampered buying local state-owned
industry goods. A wing at Darülfünun later named Istanbul University, welcomed
women to study in fields like law, medicine and science in 1912. The university
directive read: ‘Women can enter any profession. No difference between women and
men is acceptable, in this context’ (Toprak 2014: 246).
Appearing on the BBC radio program Young Ideas in December 1935 Linke
reported her first impressions of a country she knew little.
I didn’t know any more about Turkey than you, and you needn’t feel ashamed either. I had it all
mixed up with Arabian nights and Christmas pantomime, and my English friends were looking
forward to organising an expedition in order to free me from the enslavement of the harem. They
were sure I would be taken into one, and I was rather flattered at their belief in my attraction.
Well, I felt never sillier in all my life than when I landed in Istanbul—you will know it better
under the name of Constantinople—when I saw the huge blocks of apartment houses sticking out
from the hills against the blue sky. The customs-official addressed me in English, the Turkish
girl in French, and she wore a Parisian hat tipped over her right eye. I felt as clumsy at her side
as an elephant conversing with a peacock. It took about a fortnight to re-adjust myself to regain
my self-assurance (1935b, p. 2).
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Admitting herself ‘never sillier’ Linke hoped to influence the BBC audience to question
their habits. Reference to ‘Arabian nights’ and ‘enslavement in harems’ discredited the
doctored fairytales of yesteryear by European authors.
In light of Veblen’s assertion that women have stronger proclivities for an
instinct of workmanship and parental bent, who better to take on the task than women?
‘The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman than upon the man to live her own
life in her own way’ (1899/2009: 232). Since women fought in the national struggle, the
idea to form a political party originated out of this solidarity. On 15 June 1923 Nezihe
Muhiddin, Nimet Remide and Lâtife Bekir among others—prior to declaration of the
Turkish Republic on 29 October—founded the Women’s People’s Party (Kadınlar Halk
Fırkası), KHF hereafter, as the first women’s political party in the Republic (Toprak
2014: 463). Educator, novelist, political leader and women’s rights advocate Halidé
Edip Adivar (1884-1964) wrote, ‘a country belongs to its women more than to its men.
It was they who recognized instinctively a danger to their homes, although they were
not in a position to know the politically complicated reasons which lead the men of
every country to war’ (1928: 6). Ten years at war had frayed the social fabric in the
transition from Empire to Republic. Of the Turkish soldiers mobilized for WWI over
26.8 percent were killed, approximately 1,454,000 (Ferguson 1998: 295, 299). This
figure does not include casualties from the Balkan Wars (1912) and War of
Independence (1919-1922). As women were left to pick up the pieces after men’s
predatory exploit, with few prospects for work, prostitution exploded across the
country, especially in Istanbul. Famine, disease and poverty were widespread. Born out
of societal denigration the KHF prioritized family and education as their party agenda.
In 1924, Muhiddin and her peers founded the Turkish Women’s Union (Türk Kadınlar
Birliği), TKB hereafter (Toprak 2014: 473). After 1927 the TKB took on a political tone
emphasizing women’s suffrage and entrance into politics and entrepreneurship.
Sabiha Zekeriya Sertel (1895-1968) was an early progenitor of women’s rights
and social justice. Considered the first woman journalist of the modern Republic, Sertel
was a writer, social worker and leading feminist who recognized three categories of
women: ev kadını (housewife), meslek kadının (professional woman) and dünya kadını
(global woman) (p. 181). She wrote, edited and published weekly and monthly
periodicals Resimli Ay, Resimli Perşembe, Resimli Hafta, Sevimli Ay and wrote for the
daily newspaper Tan (Shissler 2008: 13). A high school graduate from the Ottoman city
of Salonika, trained at the New York School of Social Work (1919–23), one of her
hallmark projects was gathering empirical evidence about social issues, including those
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of women’s rights and education, women at work, child employment and prostitution.
Sertel argued women must work alongside men in factories, in government and as
entrepreneurs.
Go love whatever man you want, go live with whatever man you want—that is a right accorded
to your heart, desire, and will. We are giving you the same personal freedom that we give to
men. But, mind you, you are a person in society like a man, and like [any] person you are
obliged to be productive in society... so, go to whichever you want of our factories, commercial
establishments, and workplaces, and work (Sertel cited in Shissler p. 20).
In Sevimli Ay, a journal focusing on social issues, Sertel published articles on women
working in tobacco factories, as waitresses and as teachers (Zekeriya 1930: 22). Shissler
suggests Sertel’s worldview was particularly Marxist. This put her out of favor with the
RPP. Rather than bucking them as ‘Republican opposition’, Sertel’s instinct of
workmanship guided her to work for the common good in ‘loyal opposition’ to the RPP
(p. 14). As a masterless woman of ‘lively intellect’ Sertel worked to advance the
Turkish ‘situation’ that strove for modernization, secularization and industrialization.
Critical of women’s understanding of feminism, in an essay she counseled future
sisters: ‘Turkish feminism does not expect intellectuals to discuss women in books or
reflection, but study them in life itself. Only these studies would bring a scientific trend
in Turkish feminism’ (Toprak 2014: 511). One must touch all strata of society, observe
and embrace life, not be imprisoned by book knowledge alone. And we recall of Freire,
‘[h]uman beings are because they are in a situation. And they will be more the more
they […] critically act upon it’ (1970/1996: 90).
Across the world women’s rights were now interconnected with politics. By
1932 over eighteen million women had signed a declaration calling for disarmament
(Toprak 2014: 490). In 1933 Clara Zetkin’s ‘The Toilers Against War’ called for
international solidarity of the workers against imperialism (p. 487). In 1934 the World
Congress of Women Against War and Fascism was held in Paris. In 1935 from April 18
to 25 the twelfth International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship
(IAW) took place in Istanbul at Yıldız Palace. Hosted by Lâtife Bekir and the TKB,
delegates from thirty-nine countries, including women from Iran, Palestine, Egypt and
India, together with a plethora of diplomats and journalists flocked to Istanbul. Women
from Italy and Germany did not attend while those from Britain, America and France
came with an agenda (p. 496). To my knowledge Linke did not attend the congress. She
was in Anatolia encountering common man with whom probably few of the European
delegates were familiar or in whom they were probably not interested. Swiss delegate
Emilie Gourd confessed: ‘I am jealous of Turkish women’ (p. 492). Katherine Bompas
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general secretary to the International Women’s Union confided: ‘As European women,
we honestly envy Turkish women’ (p. 492). President of the IAW, Britain’s Corbett
Ashley, opened the congress stating: ‘freedom for women, peace for humanity’ (p. 489).
As Turkish women were equal to their men the TKB hadn’t anticipated Ashley’s
distinct stress on pacifism. This political stance was new thinking for the TKB
according to Toprak (p. 491).
Despite overwhelming success, on 10 May Bekir announced the closure of the
TKB. Declaring women had achieved their rights it was no longer necessary to work for
these ends. Those who wished to do so could chose from a variety of other societies (p.
495). The TKB was not the only society shut down. In 1928 the Worker’s Society and
Skilled Labour Society were closed. Toprak equates Bekir’s announcement to close the
TKB a result of Turkey’s foreign policy during the interwar period that chose not to
show its hand (p. 496). The official RPP stand was: ‘Peace at home. Peace in the
world’. Libal (2008) frames the congress merely a platform for ‘staging women’s
emancipation’ in Turkey. To my mind, Libal sorrowfully undermines the legitimate
headway Turkish women made and has scant intuition or understanding about why the
move was taken. The TKB decision to close might have been contradictory but war was
now largely anticipated.
The Geist or spirit of the 1930s saw women take the lead in shaping their society
and doing their part for common good across the world. Annie Buller (1896-1973)—a
Canadian of Ukrainian descent—fought for fair wages and decent work places for
textile and mining workers across Canada. The main organizer at the open pit coalmine
in Bienfait, Buller was jailed two years for her insubordinate spirit (Watson 1976). Thus
the global mood was increasingly authoritarian. Mustafa Kemal was concerned that the
strength of Turkish women’s insubordination might unduly pacify the masses or divide
society. His reasoned conventional wisdom was to take precautionary measures to
protect the nation. If Turkey was threatened by imperialist powers, yet again, her men
and women should be ready to fight. Thus Mustafa Kemal and the RPP presciently had
betterment of the whole in mind. Closure of the TKB should not be singled out as a
unique case to Turkey.
This did not silence insubordinate women outright. Much like Linke, Meliha
Avni Sözen (1905-1993) poet, writer and journalist worked ceaselessly to reshape her
society. Across the 1930s she spoke on radio programs, at open-air meetings in parks
and squares, at theatres, conference halls, middle schools, universities and People’s
House (Halkevi). She addressed women: ‘Rather than others, you will be the example
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for others, you will work, work endlessly continuously, through frugality, and knowing
the value that comes from the soil, water and nature’ (Sözen 1936: 99). To artisans,
workers and farmers she offered: ‘We will be the capital’ (p. 100). She encouraged
solidarity between urban and rural women. ‘Stretch out your delicate hand, adorned
with manicured fingernails, to the peasant woman’s precious hands, calloused with soil
and manure’ (p. 101). Sözen’s thinking reflected the spirit of the times (threat of another
war) and women’s role in supporting collective work, solidarity and national stability.
Selma Ekrem (1902-1986)—granddaughter of the Turkish poet and playwright
Namık Kemal—travelled to the United States in 1923 and lived part of her life there.
She worked at the Turkish Consulate in New York City and was a university lecturer
until she returned to Turkey in the 1930s. Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish
Girl (1931) is Ekrem’s account of experiences both in Turkey and the United States.
Turkey Old and New (1947) is a comprehensive study of modern Turkey. There was
forever a need to educate the English-speaking reader about the Turkish Republic. In
Unveiled, she wrote her first impressions of the United States. ‘To me New York was
the modern fairy city. […] the American mind, fairy lore to an Eastern eye’ (p. 254) ‘an
American Thousand and One Nights Tales’ (p. 255). ‘I saw people running as if their
coat tails were on fire […] where were these people running to’ (p. 255)? Ekrem’s
account challenged the Oriental gaze of the west on the east, by purposely emulating
their terminology. Confronted by habitual racism, when a passport agent at the airport
learned she was from Turkey, he asked her: ‘Where did you get those clothes?’ She
sarcastically responded: ‘We do not go around in my country wrapped in Turkish
towels’ (p. 253). Dressed in the latest fashions, oddly enough: ‘No one believed that I
was a Turk’ (p. 260). Ekrem concluded: ‘The Terrible Turk ruled the minds of the
Americans’ (p. 261). Seeing the United States with fresh eyes, Ekrem captured keen
observations. ‘Happiness here had to be bought’ (p. 264). Writing on American women
and their relationship to men, she aptly noted a ‘boy friend’ was nothing but an
American ‘commodity’ (p. 268).
Another spirit of insubordination İffet Halim Oruz (1904-1993) joined the TKB
opening the Diyarbakır branch in 1927 (Köse 2006). Born in Diyarbakır, although a
published poet and playwright, Oruz wrote Women in New Turkey (Yeni Türkiye’de
Kadın 1933), Price Inspection in Turkey: Legislation and Application (Türkiye’de Fiyat
Murakabesi: Mevzuat ve Tatbikat 1944) coauthored with Sıtkı Yırcalı and The
Women’s Revolution in Turkey During Atatürk’s Era (Atatürk Döneminde Türkiye’de
Kadın Devrimi 1986). In a collection of speeches published Friends! (Arkadaşlar!
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1936), she counseled fellow citizens about the Great Depression:
It is absurd to call this depression an economic depression. Since the time of human
consciousness, although people consider the act of getting on well with each other as part of
humanity, unfortunately they weren’t able to get rid of some personal issues that caused them to
act in the opposite way. This is comparable to the situation between nations (p. 13).
Under 1930s Étatism protectionist measures encouraged people to purchase Turkishmade goods to support industrialization and ensure internal stability through work. She
too called on the populace to buy local and save their money. Oruz thought it the only
way to avoid heading into another war (WWII). Simply she used her common sense.
Post 1980 Turkish feminists and gender scholars re-explored the Republican era
and posed questions as to whether women were ‘actors or pawns’ of largely male elites
spearheading Turkey’s modernization effort (Kandiyoti 1989). Recognizing Tekili’s
argument Kandiyoti (1987) states ‘singling out women as the group most visibly
oppressed by religion, through practices such as veiling, seclusion, and polygamy, was
absolutely central to Atatürk’s onslaught on the theological state which culminated in
the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924’ (p. 321). Placing these feminist ideas in their
historical context their scholarly work came on the heels of three harsh military coup
d’état (1960, 1971, 1980) that undoubtedly provoked criticality of male-dominated
power structures. Kandiyoti claims state reforms were ‘class-biased’ using the middle
and upper socio-economic strata of women as role models to lead the lower ones (p.
323). Although some might disagree, I posit Mustafa Kemal’s strategy was born out of
necessity, in this regard. Recall Veblen’s astute argument human psychology seeks
forms of emulation, which for him denotes leisure class ‘invidious comparison’ of
possessions and common man’s emulation of the leisure class. However in the Turkish
case, these role-model women were not the ‘leisure class’ outright. They were not idle.
On the contrary, they worked actively as progenitors for social evolution, taking the
lead to better the whole.
Some Turkish feminists and gender scholars read the early Republican era as
‘state feminism’ (Tekeli 1988 cited in Durakbaşa 2001). Furthermore, as Turkish
scholars tend to borrow heavily from Marxist class-analysis, the real efforts of women
each with their own capabilities—be they of elite, middle or lower socio-economic
strata—results in a division of common work for betterment of the whole strictly along
class lines. Thus it is argued only elite women were emancipated. Kandiyoti (1987)
questions, ‘what is the relationship, if any, between ‘emancipation’ and ‘liberation’?
The latter means to ‘set (someone) free from a situation, especially imprisonment or
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slavery, in which their liberty is severely restricted’ while the former implies to ‘set
free, especially from legal, social, or political restrictions’. Here then, we arrive at a
conundrum. Women were freed from one form of male dominance (old order religiousempire values) to be delivered, if willing to adapt to new habits, into another form of
male dominance (new order secular-state values). This stance blocks any solution and
obfuscates other questions. Where does the reality of women working for common good
enter in the discussion? Why is this subject lost, when failure to industrialize and
maintain Turkey’s ‘national economy’ in the interwar period might have ended in a
failed state throwing the lot back into war?
To my mind, Turkish feminists and gender scholars—as granddaughters of
modernization—still tend to favor study of the middle and elite socio-economic strata,
neglecting lower-strata women, who too, were brave enough to change their habits, to
work in factories, learn the new language and discard the veil. The post 1980 feminist
trajectory, as elsewhere, is largely entangled in the web of corporate control over female
sexuality (p. 325). Recent scholarship on the Republican era focuses on culture and
dress (Yılmaz 2013) and nostalgia for the modern (Özyürek 2006). What interests me is
the lack of any cohesive study grounded in the work of common man. Here, I refer to
both the alleged ‘elite’ women and men, together with the ordinary working class
women and men (common man). I am referring to those who put these class differences
aside to work for the betterment of the whole (Republic). Ayşe Buğra mentions this
willingness. The Association of Philanthropists (Yardım Sevenler Derneği) and The
Society for the Protection of Children, were run mostly by women. There was a general
sentiment in the public of ‘cooperation and solidarity’ whereby ‘well-to-do citizens who
were expected to take responsibility in the realm of social assistance’ in a ‘spirit of the
times when profits and profitmaking activities were regarded with a deep-set suspicion’
(2007: 38).
Durakbaşa’s (2001) work on the novelist Adalet Ağaoğlu continues to reproduce
an uneven discourse between elite and working women for her emphasis on narratives
of the elite. In an essay on Mevhibe İnönü (wife of İsmet Pasha, commander of the
national struggle) Ağaoğlu wrote of the ‘forgotten women’ or the ‘real persons’ as ‘real
carriers of modernization’. In her words:
Why have those women been the ones whose inner worlds have been the least of interest? Why
haven’t they been written about with a deep interest of seeing and knowing? The wife of a
statesman, head of an association, volunteer nurse, corporal, teacher, the first lawyer, loyal wife,
perfect mother… “Those women” were women who could overcome all those “ill eyes” over
them, without losing their balance (Ağaoğlu cited in Durakbaşa p. 196).
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Ağaoğlu’s point about the ‘forgotten women’ in the modernization project and the need
for ‘deep interest of seeing and knowing’ is a fertile idea. While I am grateful to
Durakbaşa for pursuing Ağaoğlu’s suggestion, albeit ‘elite’ examples, I question why
Turkish scholars (men and women) have largely overlooked the working women in
factories—teachers alike—as spearheads to reshape their provincial communities? Here
Linke might provide some fruitful information in her narratives on the relationship
between these agents of social evolution. Women were very much encouraged to raise
themselves to equal place with men as evident in Mustafa Kemal’s following statement:
If it is found to be sufficient to have only one of the two sexes that compose a society equipped
with the contemporary needs, more than half of that society would remain weak... Therefore, if
knowledge and technology are necessary for our society, both our men and women have to
acquire them equally (31 January, 1923 cited in Arat, 2000: 160).
Although acquiring knowledge and technology was the ideal, and it was as much up to
the women as the men, practice was often more difficult. Again, centuries of uneven
and combined development that reconstituted further uneven relationships between men
and women could not be wiped away with a magic wand overnight.
Common ‘Instinct of Workmanship’
From Linke’s experiences and writing of them, I discern an instinct of
workmanship, which may contribute to new knowledge on the era. She included the
diverse voices of all socio-economic strata of common man in her narratives, respecting
their work and aims despite the fact that the outcomes that resulted were sometimes
contradictory. Perhaps it is paradoxical that Linke’s contacts were primarily with men.
Men mostly showed her around factories, hospitals, schools and construction sites. This
illustrates a division of labor did exist along gender lines, in some cases, yet this need
not obfuscate the fact that women too ‘had a taste for effective work’. Linke’s
insubordinate spirit posed difficult questions to both those she encountered and to her
readers. ‘Emancipatory praxis’ what I explained in Part I as Freire’s word=work=praxis
was a dialogue cultivated through ‘reflection and action’ (1970/1996: 68). ‘If I do not
love the world—if I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into
dialogue’, stated Freire (p. 71). Her narratives were not the fanciful construction of a
travel writer, what Lisle (2006) argued reproduces ‘remnants of Orientalism,
colonialism and Empire’ (p. 5). Linke did not leave the reader’s mind to trail off and
imagine scenarios about the ‘terrible Turk’ in the way some Europeans represented
them (Çırakmak 2005). Rather when experiences are placed in a broader framework of
‘continuity’ and ‘interaction’ (along the lines of Dewey’s experiential learning), Linke
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encouraged the reader to interpret workmanship as a shared goal between alleged
‘elites’ and common man alike. Her approach resembles Goethean scientific method
(tender empiricism) that intuited and reasoned, based on experience, what obstacles they
faced. She worked hard to give the reader a multi-perspectival view such that they draw
their own conclusions. She hoped to alter the reader’s habit of thought about Turkey and
to force readers to question the self and habitual thought. To this end, Linke used
juxtaposition devices that at first glance appear as contradictory streams of thought.
Done on purpose, with a purpose, her juxtapositions worked to make the reader think
just as Eisenstein’s montage worked to make the audience ‘help itself’ not ‘entertain it’
(1963: 84). In this manner, her narratives take the reader, and Linke herself, on a
continuous pedagogical emancipatory journey.
Linke’s encounters form a ‘conscious-process-participation epistemology’ in
Wahl’s (2005: 70) reading of Goethean science that employs experience, empathy,
intuition and imagination (p. 60). This is apparent in the following example. In a chapter
‘Some Happy Women’ Linke met a group of veiled women in Sivas. ‘I smiled at them,
they smiled at me’ (AD 31).
It is impossible to imagine a greater well-being. A gentle friendliness streamed out of these
women, each resting in herself, but also closely linked to the others. […] It did not matter that
we spoke strange languages—words were of no avail. It did not matter that our lives were so
different—did we not share the most important experience, that of being a woman (AD 32)?
Confronting English-readers habitual biases that women in countries like Turkey (the
Muslim Near and Middle East) must somehow be eternally unhappy because they live
under despotism, Linke pushed the point. ‘They had certainly spent all their lives in
simple harems and adhered strictly to the ancient traditions. But having thus been
enslaved, they seemed none the worse for it’ (AD 32). Using her juxtaposition device
and multi-perspectival view, Linke’s next sentence questioned: ‘Or did I make the
mistake of most travellers of judging things by their outward appearance’ (AD 32)?
Befriending a young woman from the group Lütfiye, she asked several questions to the
reader and also the self.
Did she for the first time see the rising of a new time? Did she envy me the life of which I had
given them a faint outline or any of my belongings, did she want to become a “modern girl”
herself? Nothing is stranger than the reactions of a young heart, no change swifter or caused by
smaller incidents (AD 35).
As if in conversation with herself and the reader, Linke answered her questions. ‘Yet it
might just as well be that she merely wanted to be kind and disliked refusing a wish of
her “dear sister”’ (AD 35). Tender empiricist praxis refuted the ‘us’ and ‘them’ couched
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in an inferior-superior binary taught at imbecile institutions. Linke subtly hinted their
shared encounter was a reciprocal exchange. Both would undergo change after the
experience of experiencing each other.
Later that afternoon, Linke visited the local crafts-school in Sivas where boys
and girls were trained. A woman of about forty Hattice Hanim—herself a carpet-weaver
since the age of five—was now the principal of the department training two-dozen
young girls in carpet weaving, craftsmanship still alive in modern Turkey. Having taken
off the veil Hattice’s relation with her whole family was severed (AD 36). ‘She was not
yet a modern woman who can rely on herself, but out of her own free will she had taken
the first step in that direction’ (AD 36). She invited Linke to watch one girl tie twelve
knots per inch. Linke posed another question. ‘How can we enjoy the fruits of such
labour which hardly suffices to sustain the patient worker? But if I protest against these
carpets, must I not also refuse to buy the cheap Japanese goods and who knows how
many others’ (AD 36)?
These excerpts offer several subtle points. First, she underlined the ‘free will’
and willingness of Hattice—a common woman (non-elite)—to embrace new cultural
habit even when it meant family rejection. Second, she emphasized the low-paid
salaries of young girls working at carpet weaving. Incidentally young girls are chosen
for this work because their slim fingers allow for tighter weaving of knots per inch.
Desire for hand-made carpets forces the reader to think s/he may be equally responsible
in supporting child labor. Third, advancement in the Industrial Arts brings further
exploitation whether in Japan or elsewhere. In 1932, when Linke visited French women
silk-weavers, the canut, in Lyon, France, she had posed similar questions (TWE 144).
Again, Linke’s ‘continuity’ in learning afforded her a new way of seeing (Anschauen)
across geographies that employed intuition (Anschauungen) to knit experiences together
and arrive at a rational synthesis (Vernunft). She articulated what Jameson suggested the
writer discover and relate, namely a ‘shared humanity’, often facing similar obstacles.
Turkey had to industrialize and modernize to survive. Witness to these contradictions,
Linke concluded of Sivas: ‘Modern times had intruded even into this old-fashioned
place, and as often they had brought no improvement’ (AD 37).
Linke viewed herself a ‘sincere friend of the Turks’ (AD 41) (Fig. 12), although
concerned she might be seen with suspicion. Determined to learn how the independence
of women was viewed (AD 41), she realized some men and women fully embraced it,
while others were skeptical. Her insubordinate spirit wanted to confront the ideas of her
‘cynical friends at Istanbul’ (AD 59). In the eastern town of Malatya, Bay Nebi (director
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of the Banque Ottomane) informed her: ‘There have been tremendous changes in the
past few years, not only outwardly, but in the minds and hearts of the people. It was
only ten years ago that people threw stones through the windows of a house in which a
woman was playing a lute because only loose women played worldly instruments. And
they attacked others who dared to walk through the streets unveiled’ (AD 198). Skeptics
might accuse this ‘elite’ man of fabrication. Ekrem wrote similar experiences when she
was threatened for wearing a hat. ‘It is a sin, hanoum, a sin,’ he shouted at Selma’s
mother. ‘Your children are wearing hats as Christians do. Are you not a Moslem?’
(1931: 168). This man’s protestations should be placed in historical context. English
and Senegalese soldiers (brought in by the French) occupied the streets of Istanbul.
Selma recalled: ‘We were waiting for our tram, which did not come. Then we saw a
group of English sailors, arm in arm. Not one leg was straight, not one face was sober.
They passed near us and one of them came to us and almost fell upon us […] Get out of
here, you drunk’ Berat shouted, and we pushed him away with all our might’ […] These
scenes of drunkenness revolted us, and Stamboul turned pale with shame and anger’ (p.
245). Naturally social tensions were high under foreign occupation after WWI.
In Kayseri, Linke visited a textile Kombinat covering eight square miles of
land—the first of its kind—a result of Turkish-Russian collaboration (AD 307) after the
Moscow Treaty of Friendship signed in March 1921 (AD 85). Borrowing ideas from the
Soviets, Turkish engineers traveled to Moscow and returned with fresh ideas to advance
the nations betterment without subordinating to communism. State-owned Sümerbank
(1933) built the cloth factory (Bez Fabrikası) while the Soviets designed factory plans,
supplied the machinery, issued twenty-year interest free credit and sent two hundred
engineers to supervise construction (AD 308). When Linke arrived, it was still under
construction but the director Bay Fazıl, was happy to show her around the ambitious
project of the Five-Year-Plan (1934-1938). She noticed bright red streamers that read
‘Long live the Turkish-Russian friendship!’ There were pictures of Atatürk and Lenin
on the walls (AD 308). Bay Fazıl was choosing and educating future workers. Linke
asked: ‘Where will you find them?’ He replied: ‘Among the Turkish youth’ (AD 303)!
A store-room was transformed into a temporary class-room and Linke watched
thirty boys aged fourteen to sixteen and a girl of fifteen undergo an examination for a
six-month apprenticeship. Two Russian engineers and two Turkish foremen sat before
them. When it came time for the girl to be examined, Linke noticed she completed her
tasks in the exam even quicker than the boys.
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It was amazing what these children had learnt in so short a time. They understood a great many
complicated technical processes knew the meaning of every single screw, could tie knots and
mend broken threads—they had learnt that in a single day—and were able to describe the
kombinat down to the last corner and all it stood for. Their eagerness to learn seemed
inexhaustible (AD 311).
Linke met Nimet after the exam. She was an orphan who had worked in an Istanbul
tobacco factory. Linke questioned: ‘“And you think you’ll like working here?” Her eyes
lit up, her face lost its expression of grown-up self-composure. “Oh, yes,” she said with
a little blush, “and the director told me I can live in one of the new boarding-houses”’
(AD 311). We could interpret Nimet as oppressed by the elite but doesn’t a chance to
learn by doing improve her lot through effective work? Buğra points out, it was
deliberate and rational policy to keep the peasants in the countryside to reduce
population displacement to urban settings during the Depression (p. 36). Instead of
leaving Nimet and other youth like her destitute, the RPP made it a policy to offer the
chance for work in the ‘mixed economy’ of state-run industries. Linke made a point to
mention Nimet was from Istanbul, thus it seems probable the RPP tried to balance urban
and rural poverty rather than in Europe were there was mass unemployment in urban
centers and great instability. Thus, there was rationality and efficiency in the
government placing Nimet in a safe, clean abode offering security and a future. Sertel’s
July 1930 article in Resimli Ay illustrates conditions in tobacco and leather factories
were atrocious. Women and children as young as nine years old, worked in unhealthy,
damp, unlit spaces. They looked up at visitors like frightened cats. An insubordinate
Sertel counseled her reader about factory work: ‘They do not work to live, they live to
work. This is the sole mission of women and children in industrial life’ (Zekeriya 1930:
18). Customs tariffs were only lifted in August 1928, thus the state was not yet in a
financial position to reverse deplorable work conditions. In 1935, Linke’s narratives
wrote positively of tobacco factory production while in 1928 Sertel witnessed systemic
poverty from the remains of imperialism still using its ‘strong hand’.
Bay Fazıl planned the construction of two boarding houses, one male, one
female, with a canteen and housekeeper. Linke was skeptical whether all would come to
fruition in the way he envisioned. Fazıl stressed, ‘they could not afford to waste time by
trying to do things slowly. It was best to go the whole way in one stride and hope for the
best’ (AD 311-12). Linke’s 1946 experiences with the Mexican engineer José had
insisted on slow development. In Turkey it was the exact opposite where reforms were
swiftly carried out. Fazıl noted Kayseri was a conservative town where villagers live in
‘dirty hovels’. ‘Here they’ll be properly looked after. I’ll get two forewomen from
Russia to train and mother them. They’ll have decent meals, the sports grounds as a
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playing-field, clean dresses and a doctor to watch over their health’ (AD 312). The
factory would employ 4,500 men, women and girls in three shifts producing thirty
million yards of cloth annually (AD 312-13). A mosquito-infested swamp was drained
two years earlier to make room for seven hundred family homes. Parks would be built.
Trees planted. Thus through work, the government sought to evolve habituation by
providing a community, equipped with social facilities, to bring men and women
together in a new cultural environment. Sound and legitimate governance, work was
accomplished in concrete deeds that provided for common man as they worked for the
state. In short it was reciprocity. Étatism secured local (community) consumption from
local production, reinstating pride in common man that helped to rationally ‘balance the
books’ (Birtek 1985). Sümerbank had dressed its citizens and secured their dignity, selfconfidence and instinct of workmanship. On 11 May 1939, the Cumhuriyet newspaper
confidently wrote: ‘Affordable Clothes for Turkish Villagers’ (Tuna p. 249). Instinct of
workmanship facilitated a cultural (r)evolution through ‘cultural action’ which for
Freire is liberation of men and women. But more than this, as Buğra points out, the RPP
worked to maintain a ‘“respectable” standard of living’ for the civil servants such that
‘the dignity of the state’s servants’ would ‘prevent their misery to reflect upon the state
itself’ (2007: 38). This implies a kind of reciprocity between the citizen and the state
and the state and the citizen, such that each actualizes this dignity. The ‘standard of
living’ is an interesting point in light of Veblen, who purported common man need a
‘standard of living’ to ensure self-esteem. In this manner, the state worked for its
citizen’s self-esteem, where it could.
In the southeastern city of Adana, Linke visited the cotton factory (Mensucat
Fabrikası) under the state-controlled Agricultural Bank (Ziraat Bankası) (AD 261). Bay
Ceylan came from one of the leading families of Adana and his son Hüsrev worked as a
civil servant for the state-run operation. Linke observed out of five hundred workers no
younger than fifteen, only a third or so were women (AD 264). According to statistics,
Linke was not far off the mark.107 108 Workers were fed in the canteen. Linke questioned
why prices were rather high. Ceylan explained canteen profits contributed to an accident
fund (AD 265). This triggered Linke to ask if work accidents were frequent. Ceylan
replied: ‘No. The workers are on the whole quite cautious. But if anything happens, all
expenses for treatment and so on are paid out of the accident funds, and the wages run
on as if the man were working. And by the way—we have one up on you. Our men and
107
108
In 1934 factory workers were 49,748 men and 16,499 women (Makal 1999: 221).
In 1935 agriculture comprised 35.5 percent and industry 18.1 percent (p. 245).
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women get equal pay for equal work’ (AD 265)!109 Although the factory was not ideal,
plans were in the pipeline for a new one four times the size, part of the industrial FiveYear-Plan (AD 265). Should we assume the family lived in luxury while workers in
abject poverty Linke visited Ceylan’s home. ‘The house itself was simply furnished in
European manner with sideboard, piano, and family photographs—any better-off
English clerk in suburbia might live like this. There was nowhere any sign of luxury’.
Linke concluded Ceylan ‘certainly had no money to waste. The country is poor and
pays its officials accordingly’ (AD 262).
While in Adana, Linke also visited a privately owned oil and soap factory. The
owner, a ‘naturalized Greek or Russian’ was away but his nephew took her around.
Linke sarcastically referred to the young man as a ‘Hollywood beau’ based on his looks,
smile and ‘swinging gait’ (AD 266). The factory was ten years old (1925) indicating it
was a remainder of private ownership welcomed in the Republic after 1923. Although
the factory had modern machinery and 150 workers with daily wages that had risen
from 80 to 125 piastres, Linke remarked work at the oil-press was ‘much harder and
more unhealthy than at the Mensucat Fabrikası’ (AD 266).
When Hollywood and I entered this workroom, a skeleton of a man was just pushing a large
yellow oil-cake under the press. His face was nothing but skin and bones, long and incredibly
lean limbs were sticking out of a ragged pair of shorts and a sleeveless shirt, all soaked in yellow
oil. His movements were completely automatic, and one was led to believe that his soul had left
his body and fled in despair. Three other men were turning round a huge grindstone standing up
on edge, and the whole scene in its brown and yellow colours resembled one of those mediæval
pictures of hell in which tortured bodies cringe in eternal agony (AD 266).
While this description clearly demarcates the oil and soap factory from the cotton
factory, prior to this statement, Linke noted a committee was drafting a new Labour
Code. She was told a ‘German expert had been called upon to assist’. It might well turn
out to be the ‘most modern in the world’ (AD 265). Linke’s narratives about work in
Adana indicate; first, men more than women worked in the factory as women still
worked the land. Pamuk points to a shortage of labor in Anatolia due to the strength of
family farms (2000: 17). Industrialization while adhering to ‘revolutionism’ worked at
cross-purposes with agricultural production, a point Okyar mentions (1965: 103-104).
Second, provision for work-related accidents proves government commitment to give
back in exchange for labor. Third, emphasizing Ceylan’s statement ‘we have one up on
you’ as ‘men and women get equal pay for equal work’ Linke underscored wage
equality was achieved in some cases in Turkey. Fourth, she showed the director did not
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Men aged nineteen and up were paid 8 kürüş/hour. Women nineteen and up were paid 7 kürüş/hour, a
slight imbalance (Makal p. 311). These rates are commensurate with Linke’s findings.
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flaunt leisure wealth before common man but chose to live pragmatically within his
means. Fifth, privately owned factories were allowed under Étatism under a ‘mixed’
economic program. Linke didn’t anticipate exploitative policies would be condoned. It
was, however, the intention to keep this limited by setting a good example in state-run
industries as an invitation to emulate progressive ideas. Uneven development made
itself visible and rather exposes some unregulated areas—the further east Linke
journeyed—that were in fact to be regulated. This would show up the workings of
private industry in the east of Turkey which, if we take Linke’s account, was in a
sorrowful state of affairs when compared to state-run and owned industries. This begs
the question, why this was so, but exploring this subject is beyond the scope of this
research. Sixth, Linke’s choice to use ‘Hollywood’ as a pseudonym for a private owner,
upon seeing ‘a skeleton of man’ working for him, might indicate a criticism of the
United States, as she experienced pauperization during WWI, the hyperinflation and
1929 stock market crash. Linking her emotions to this experience would be speculative.
In Tarsus, a town in the province of Mersin in the south, an elderly man who
knew some French took Linke around. The owner of the factory was one of the ‘richest
men in the country, very likely a multi-millionaire’ she was told (AD 268). He had spent
half a million liras to rebuild the factory and equip it with modern machinery. Taken
through the old part of the factory first, she witnessed depressing conditions: ‘children
working, little creatures whom no one could believe to be twelve years or even older’
(AD 268). They threw bunches of cotton into ‘large teeth of iron combs’ as they worked
around the spinning machines. ‘One woman, examining the finished cloth, was holding
a living bundle on her lap though she herself was hardly eighteen yet’ (AD 268). For a
twelve hour workday children earned forty piasters but a woman outside told Linke it
was more like twenty-five (AD 268). When rumor had it better wages were available
elsewhere, workers were inclined to move on, a habit still prevalent from seasonal
labor. Linke did not fail to mention the economic factors involved. ‘In good years the
men had earned on the cotton fields up to two liras a day, but this year [1935] they
would hardly get more than seventy piasters and, of course, free food and housing in the
huts on the estate’ (AD 270).
These scenes upset Linke, as they destroyed her conception of fairness and
progress experienced in other locations.
Aimlessly I wandered through the hot streets, feeling depressed and infuriated. It was clear that
the vali had not done his duty and not too difficult to guess the reason why. Not everyone is
made of the stuff to attack the rich and powerful. But something ought to be done. I must tell
them in Ankara. Impossible to imagine that they knew and condoned (AD 269-70).
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In fact, Ankara would have been well aware of the problem as they allowed private
enterprise. What Linke does show the reader is the difference between state-run industry
and private industry, which is, in fact, instructive. Later that day Linke was summoned
to the police station. ‘Was it forbidden in this country to speak to honest citizens?’ (AD
271). She surmised, ‘It was quite obvious that the only cause I had given for suspicion
was my conversation with the cotton-workers. Did he think me an agitator or spy’ (AD
272)? From here she was sent to the mayor who told her: ‘You see, we are quite close to
the Syrian frontier’ (AD 272)! Keeping Turkey’s borders secure was vital. Considering
their ‘native bias’ toward protecting the state from external threats with French
colonizers in neighboring Arab countries, in hindsight, the mayor needn’t be discredited
for actions taken. Linke either misread this specific experience or tried to discreetly
illustrate to readers the complexity of sharing a contentious, porous border with Syria.
If we notice Linke’s route, the further east she journeys, the more oppressive
work conditions become. Ownership is greater and exploitation more widespread and
less controlled. This is the ‘native-bias’ of the east. Habit is couched in landlords (ağas)
exploiting the peasantry. Thus when eastern Turkey attempted to make the transition to
capitalism it retained these old habits. In western Turkey sharecropping was dissolved,
opting for family farms instead (Keyder 1983a: 70).
Notwithstanding the local issues, there was also the international dimension. To
help the reader better understand their obstacles she factored in the global Depression,
fluctuating stock prices and Turkey’s trade relations. In ‘Notes to Chapter X’ Linke
stated ‘cotton export via Mersin had been very badly hit by the world crisis’. She
underlined how trade relations could be problematic. ‘Turkey has made it a rule since
the beginning of the economic crisis to buy from those countries which buy from her’
(AD 275). ‘In 1934, Germany—making use of the agreement—bought a good deal of
the cotton crop at prices well above those of the world market since she lacked the
foreign exchange to buy from Egypt and the U.S.A.’ Germany clearly took advantage of
Turkey and other nations. Critical of their policies she wrote:
Germany could not in some and would not in many instances offer suitable goods at reasonable
terms in exchange. Having sold to Germany at what she considered good prices, Turkey like so
many other nations—found herself in possession of marks with which she could buy nothing but
what the German government offered her. Hence the German machinery, hence the German
armaments there and in the Balkan countries (AD 275).
In 1935 ‘large quantities of rails for the new lines [railways] under construction arrived
from Germany’ (AD 275) indicating a renewed interest in railroad expansion eastward.
Such activity did not please the Anglo-American alliance either pre-WWI or thereafter
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(Earle 1924; Staley 1935; Stolper 1942). Thus the mayor of Tarsus did exercise
common sense in warning, ‘we are quite close to the Syrian frontier’.
In Samsun, another town that worked out a Five-Year-Plan themselves, Linke
visited a state-run tobacco factory. Requesting from the mayor a formal invitation to
visit, he replied to Linke: ‘We’re not so grand here. You just go and ask him’ (AD 161).
The director of the factory took her around.
He had given his life’s work to this factory and cherished its four hundred workers with a truly
paternal love. Most of them were women and girls from fourteen years onward, wearing grey
linen overalls and dust-caps. They looked neat and business-like, not so very different from the
girls I had once watched at Wills’ tobacco factory in Bristol (AD 161).
Here Linke has used ‘perceptive imagination’ to illustrate to the reader that the Turkish
factory was on par, quality wise, with a Bristol tobacco factory. The director informed:
My girls are good and steady workers, and I can trust every single one of them. Every year two
million kilos of tobacco pass through their hands. What do they earn? Well, most of them are on
piecework and make seventy-five to eighty piasters a day. The Americans at Gary’s pay them
approximately the same. It’s not much, but enough to keep them—you must allow twenty-five
piasters for a proper meal in a restaurant (AD 161).
Gary’s Tobacco Company arrived in Turkey eleven years ago, Linke noted. This would
place their entry into Turkey some time in 1924. Curious about the effects of the
‘world-crisis’ Linke asked if they had been adversely affected. ‘[O]f course we have’ he
replied but remained stubbornly optimistic. ‘Our income from the port is rapidly rising
again, and our pockets are not quite so empty. We can continue with improving the
town.’ Opening a map of the plans for Linke he offered: ‘We are going to build a
covered market, a modern slaughterhouse with cold storage, and a new sewage system.
Our present one is fifty years old and merely leads the refuse into the sea’ (AD 160).
Despite all these plans, he had not neglected the tobacco factory. ‘I had the garden laid
out here so that the girls should have something nice to look at when they come and go’
(AD 162). Linke was ‘deeply surprised’. In her ‘Notes to Chapter II’ she added:
Almost a third of the whole Turkish export trade consists in tobacco. There are three tobaccoproducing regions in Turkey: Samsun and the Black Sea coast, Izmir (Smyrna) and the Aegean
region, and the Marmara-Basin. […] The monopoly owns four factories and four workshops for
the manufacture of cigarettes and of smoking tobacco in which 3,000 workers are employed. At
the Samsun factory they have an eight-hour day. The week-end begins on Saturday at 11.30 a.m.
[…] The factory organized a special sick benefit fund to which the workers contribute two per
cent of their wages and the factory one per cent. During the first month of illness the fund pays
half the wages, and during the second and fourth a quarter. A woman who gives birth to a child
is entitled to a month’s rest with full pay and can take three more months off with half her
wages. There is no crèche attached to the factory. The women prefer leaving their children at
home (AD 167-68).
I interpret the following from these excerpts. First, ‘we’re not so grand here’ indicates
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the ease with which Linke met those of alleged ‘elite’ superior status. They were not
obscure or honorary ‘posts’ that render common man subordinate as with the institution
of the British ‘gentlemen’ (Veblen 1921/1964: 162) or German officer. On the contrary,
relations were less hierarchic and informal, an insubordinate pragmatism that was fluid
and accessible. The ‘open door’ policy originated from Ottoman ‘native-bias’. Linke
referred to it as a ‘capitalism of the civil servants’ (SCT 551). Second, undeterred by the
Great Depression, Turkey kept working at an insubordinate pace to achieve her Étatist
goals. Third, at the French Régie Company, work once allocated to non-Muslim
Ottoman women only—a kind of caste system based on ethnicity—instead, under the
Turkish state-run monopoly, a trustworthy and skilled female workforce successfully
rejuvenated Turkey’s vital tobacco production. French kolcus ‘state within a state’ was
now a thing of the past. Fourth, early forms of workers compensation and maternity
leave for women were progressive in establishing the habit of workers rights. Moreover,
the discipline of learning ‘matter-of-fact knowledge’ and ‘trained to handle modern
machinery’ (SCT 552) under industrial production, meant a more cultivated sober-mind
less afflicted with ritual, superstition and religion, a change of habit Veblen viewed
progressive.
In Malatya, Linke met İkbal, a teacher of twenty-five, who taught school
children, gave evening classes for adults and did administration work for the local
municipality. ‘[A]s soon as she talked to her pupils her face grew animated, her eyes
assumed an eager and happy expression […] Even the young men were afraid of her…’
(AD 211). Linke concluded: ‘The women are among the most active and progressive
members of the community, so much so that in certain quarters the men are already
beginning to grumble, and, to my mind, jealousy of this kind is the sincerest
compliment’ (SCT 547). ‘In some parts of the country I travelled for a week without
seeing a single veil’ (SCT 546). Some women’s outlook on marriage began to change.
Rather than Turkish and foreign scholars and feminists who assumed Turkish women
were ‘pawns’, Linke’s experiences demonstrate for the reader a different conclusion.
They [women] are excited about the great possibilities of a career of their own, and they feel a
little contempt for men. After all, what would they gain by marrying? Salaries are very low,
especially, of course, for the young men; they would have to follow their husbands wherever the
Government sent them; they would have themselves to take on all kinds of obligations; and
through all this they would lose the new freedom of which they are as yet so proud (SCT 549).
Women’s change in attitude altered male-female relationships. As many young women
had travelled abroad for higher education upon their return they tended to view local
men with skepticism. ‘The modern Turkish girl, on her part, finds little attraction in a
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man who has only breathed the air of his native town’ (SCT 549).
I do not know how English-speaking readers perceived her Turkish story.
Several individuals reviewed Allah Dethroned. Her Turkish autobiography is not part of
a series and was published by Constable & Co., a London publisher. Bostandjis found it
a ‘welcome contribution to the literature on the development of Modern Turkey’
sarcastically adding: ‘Being young and fair, she excites attention’ (p. 816). F. M. M.
wrote, ‘the author tells us much that is useful about education, social life, the
development of industry’ but limits the work by adding: ‘She is too fond of recording
trivial incidents’ (p. 271). I disagree. Precisely because Linke did record ‘trivial
incidents’, the work is much richer. She has given the reader the nuances of a culture
that cannot be captured by statistics and reified academic discourse bound to tedious
explications of theories. Her reader is invited into the narrative and to experience the
story that can no way be accomplished in ‘Ye-Olde-Textbook’ style. A progressive
review by R. M. F. asserted: ‘The author has a vivid descriptive style especially when
bringing to life the persons with whom she met or travelled’ (p. 228). This positive
review points to the authenticity of her narratives and is support for my claim Linke was
skilled with an ability to capture what she saw and experienced accurately. A newspaper
article titled ‘Lilo Linke’s Vivid Panorama of Turkey in Transition’ appeared in the
New York Times Book Review on 8 August 1937. Katherine Woods attempted to
emulate Linke’s writing style, praising the changes in Turkey but only concluded
Turkey was a ‘dictatorship’ of sorts. Expected of one who takes their habitual thought
for granted, Woods cannot fully intuit Linke’s work. She ended: ‘This is the picture of a
simple, unlearned people, through centuries autocratically governed and custom bound,
now being led—or willy-nilly driven—into ways of modern progress, even
paradoxically into ways of democratic opportunity and new freedom’. The Scotsman on
18 March 1937 wrote: ‘Miss Linke has the eager curiosity and zest for experience of the
traveller who is at heart an explorer’. Linke was described as a ‘traveller’, which limits
the potential of her work to be read as sociology or pre-cultural studies scholarship.
Linke was fully aware of the limitation but nevertheless made a case for ‘experiential
learning’ from lived experiences over ‘book-learning’. Delivering a presentation titled
‘Social Changes in Turkey’ on 4 March 1937 at the Royal Institute of International
Affairs in London, Linke openly addressed this point, testament to her spirit of
insubordination.
The other day I attended a lecture of a learned professor on Modern China. The professor was so
anxious to give the necessary “perspective” to his description of present conditions that at the
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end of his allotted time he was still dealing with Marco Polo. I am not a scientist, and shall
therefore take you straight into 1935, the year of my Turkish journey. But I have to ask
forgiveness for the absence of all book-learning, which forces me to limit my lecture to a
description of the things I saw and heard myself (SCT 540).
In sum, there is a common ‘instinct of workmanship’ in both Linke’s authorship
and Turkish common man who worked for the betterment of the whole. Linke’s
accomplishment left an excellent in depth account that is not only an autobiographical
journey across Turkey but also a pre-cultural studies reading of social and cultural
evolution realized through concrete workmanship in 1935. Not merely one person’s
account, it is an account that includes diverse voices from all socio-economic strata. As
we recall of Goethean scientific method (tender empiricism), ‘lively intellects’ practice
an infinite two-fold process. First, they welcome diverse voices and explore vitality
amongst them. Second, they allow these voices to influence them with new ideas that
gradually facilitate their metamorphosis or evolution. A ‘lively intellect’ learning by
experience, Linke was able to see anew and encouraged her reader to do the same.
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—Chapter 8—
‘Parental Bent’
The Turkish Case
Home truth four: Be a Loving Man. Always. And to
Everybody. —Moris Farhi (2007: 436)
Somehow everyone at Ankara was working and planning for
the future, envisaging the time when Turkey would be
completely modernized and proudly add her share to
European civilization. What irony to think that whilst
Turkey was striving for this end, Europe was to an ever
increasing extent abandoning the great ideals of humanity.
—Lilo Linke (AD 323)
In the early Republican era Turkey’s leaders were largely but not exclusively educated
in military academies and took civil leadership posts as engineers, doctors, educators,
directors and mayors following the War of Independence. Altınay (2004) defines the
Turkish military as a ‘cultural institution, rather than a modern state institution’ (p. 25).
Due to military interconnectedness with society—Ottoman cultural inheritance—were
they militaristic and authoritarian? Efforts sought to culturally evolve common man
largely comprised of the peasantry. These Turkish pragmatists collaborated with the
Soviets to advance Turkey’s industrialization. Linke journeyed across Anatolia as far as
the Russian border. I unpack her experiences between the engineers and civil servants
and the peasantry. I suggest her experiences echo Veblen’s notion of ‘parental bent’ that
work is done with ‘efficiency for the common good’ and disapproves ‘wasteful and
useless living’ (1914/1964: 27). Veblen’s idea on the role of engineers as emancipatory
figures is important. Şükrü Er views the engineer a ‘leader’ and ‘educator’ (cited in
Öncü 2003: 107-08). How do engineers and technicians evolve culture? What did Linke
witness and reveal about these leaders and the peasantry?
Linke was curious to learn two things on her Turkish journey. First, how did
common man perceive their leader? She never met Atatürk. Seeing herself unworthy in
tattered clothes and with no status as an accomplished journalist, Linke resigned to the
fact an interview would never be granted. Instead, she assessed Mustafa Kemal and his
peers from what purported to be their earnest, efficient work for the betterment of the
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whole. Mustafa Kemal’s picture was adorned in every public and private space ‘a man
beloved by millions. Beloved—or feared? I had yet to find out (AD 19). ‘[T]he picture
of the Gazi was meant to strengthen the heart which no longer believed in Allah’ (AD
213). Linke’s observation provided a secularist context from which the reader could
perceive the Turkish idealists success or failure. Second, she wanted to understand the
engineers and civil servants way of doing and how it aimed to evolve everyday work,
social and cultural habits in the peasantry. Did industrialization during the Étatist period
in Turkey work to improve the lives of common man or merely line private pockets?
The best way to achieve these self-imposed goals was to journey deep into the
Anatolian heartland and meet the people to experience and live how they lived.
Pauperized in Prussia as a girl, then the Weimar Republic as an adolescent and young
woman, it was not exceedingly difficult for Linke to understand what it was like to be
poor. She had learned to shirk luxury—‘swindle’ of the Inflation—and consumerism.
She traveled third class by train, slept in cheap hotels, train stations and people’s homes.
Veblen’s ‘Parental Bent’
Veblen believed women more than men harbor a ‘parental bent’ instinct
(1914/1964: 94) because men tend to be predatory from cumulative ‘traits’ of fight and
hunt. It seems somewhat contradictory, then, I should make a case for the male within
Turkey as peaceable especially when they defined themselves as ‘soldiers and warriors’
(cited in Altınay, Milli Savunma I, 1952: 6).110 Veblen’s parental bent rests on the
rational thinking it is a,
despicably inhuman thing for the current generation willfully to make the way of life harder for
the next generation, whether through neglect of due provision for their subsistence and proper
training or through wasting their heritage of resources and opportunity by improvident greed and
indolence. […] Doubtless this parental bent in its wider bearing greatly reënforces that
sentimental approval of economy and efficiency for the common good and disapproval of
wasteful and useless living that prevails so generally throughout both the highest and the lowest
cultures (Emphasis added, 1914/1964: 27).
He held that ‘parental bent’ was ‘consistent, ubiquitous and resilient’ human
behavior and one of the ‘integral hereditary traits of mankind’ (p. 28). Of teleological
aims humans set for themselves Veblen proposed: ‘Efficient use of the means at hand
and adequate management of the resources available for the purposes of life is itself an
end of endeavor, and accomplishment of this kind is a source of gratification’ (p. 3132). To be clear Veblen’s ‘efficiency’ does not imply quantity of industrial output alone.
‘Efficiency’ as outlaid in the above excerpt of Veblen implies a moral work of quality to
110
The Turkish military entered the Korean War as part of the Western Bloc to stop Soviet expansion.
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benefit common man and community without ‘neglect of due provision’. Linke, as a
witness to their industrialization put into practice, remarks on these endeavors in her
narrative, such that, both she and the reader come to understand if they worked with
moral ‘efficiency’. Linke’s point of view might alight certain aspects of this process to
cultivate a self-sufficient nation that would, as she put it, ‘add her share to European
civilization’. The military, engineers and civil servants were not men of ‘improvident
greed’. Motivated by reason and parental bent instinct these civic leaders had a moral
vision for the common good of Turkey’s present and future generations.
Thus, I weave parental bent with efficiency of workmanship (industrialization),
which also includes efficiency in human relationships both with the peasantry in Turkey
and collaboration with the Soviets who supported their industrial development by
providing credit-free loans, technicians and engineers. I also use ‘parental’ in its literal
sense as related to family—citizens of the nation—but also in the sense Veblen used the
term; ‘parental solicitude in mankind has a much wider bearing than simply the welfare
of one’s own children’ (p. 26).
Fortunate Encounters With Peasants
After a ferryboat journey from Istanbul to Samsun on the Black Sea, Linke took
a train into the interior arriving in Sivas, a conservative provincial city in central
Anatolia. She questioned what she saw, guiding the reader to do the same.
I felt confused. The modern station, the broad avenue, the post-war façade of the hotel, and these
ragged men and women with their primitive means of transport and certainly an equally
primitive life—were they merely two different stages in a natural development, or two worlds
following two parallel roads that would never meet, or were the up-to-date things I had seen,
strewn about at random by an inconsiderate government beyond the means of the country (AD
17)?
The use of ‘primitive’ was unflattering, indicating at first glance, not much was
improving in their lives. Suggesting things were ‘strewn about’ by ‘an inconsiderate
government’ provoked the reader to question if this was senseless waste and an
inefficient use of resources. In fact, Linke’s question is a germane cultural studies
enquiry. Making pedagogic use of narrative form, juxtapositions hoped to awaken the
reader to accept and appreciate their capability to initiate cultural evolution on their own
terms. Writing of the Turks, Linke called them ‘Orientals’—for the Occidental mind a
term loaded with crude connotations of backwardness, irrationality, inefficiency—then
correcting herself, undid the construct, guiding the reader to do the same. ‘These simple
Turks are not given to vague emotions or prolonged mediations on the hereafter. Their
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minds are sober, and their thoughts directed toward the problems of their everyday life’
(AD 24).
An insubordinate Linke was determined to head further east by lorry to test her
hypothesis despite concerns for her safety from the mayor of Sivas. He kindly
counseled: ‘If you were travelling in your own car or if you had a husband to protect
you—’ (AD 41). Her reply was assured: ‘But, Monsieur, I don’t understand you. Turkey
has given her women complete equality, and the Government has proved master of the
country. I am a sincere friend of the Turks. What should I be afraid of’ (AD 41)? His
concern for Linke’s safety indicates a certain distrust or underestimation of the peasants,
particularly the men. Determined to prove him wrong she boarded the kamion111
destined for Malatya and established relations with travellers, men and women alike.
No words were necessary to make myself understood. By a kind of intuition, they knew soon
enough what sort of a person I was, and once they had made up their minds, and approved of me,
I was free of all further worry—they saw to it that all the circumstances permitted was done for
me. Not spoilt by life in the town, not jealous in their poverty, they had preserved their
independence which allowed them to treat an unobtrusive foreigner in a dignified and matter-offact way, and they asked nothing in exchange but that I should accept the little they had to offer
without turning up my nose. A smile, a pleasing word in the Turkish language, a laugh at my
own awkwardness and ignorance, and the excitement my presence meant for them, were reward
enough for their generosity (Emphasis added, AD 43-44).
The above excerpt is a keen insight into how Linke perceived the self in an unfamiliar
culture and of her ‘conscious-process-participation epistemology’ in practice. Speaking
little Turkish at this stage, she relied on her intuition and keen sense of observation. In
fact, to my mind, she was an obtrusive foreigner but her thought of being ‘unobtrusive’
lies in the fact, she differed from foreigners who tended to travel first class only as far
as Ankara and gawk at the people as would tourists. Certainly her fellow travellers in
the kamion would have been curious, probably made jokes about her between them and
likely concluded the government sent her. Based on my own experiences, I see Linke’s
‘intuition’ as astute. The people of Turkey are gifted at reading and observing people,
intuitively able to sense when someone is bellicose or benevolent based on millennia of
cultures traipsing across and inhabiting the geography but also with their engagement
with vastly different cultures in the Ottoman Empire. Simply put, conventional wisdom.
But as they were poor their ‘situation’ (Freire) of poverty might prejudice thinking
otherwise, as the poor are generally classed inferior. Hinting the reader negate any
hierarchy between herself and her fellow travellers, Linke admitted her own ignorance
and awkwardness. Sharing sleeping quarters with fellow women travellers in a
111
Chevrolet or Ford lorry used for transporting goods and passengers.
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caravansary112 in the small village of Zara and eating communally with men and
women, ‘perceptive imagination’ likened the experience to her ‘Youth Movement’ days
in Weimar, when they too, slept in primitive conditions (AD 48). Instead of being
treated an outsider, she was welcomed into the circle. I suggest it was their instinctive
parental bent to look after another’s wellbeing and need not be interpreted, as peasants
fearing reprisal should harm come to Linke. I liken it to the Turkish expression ‘sahip
çıkmak’ (take responsibility) for another that I read, vis-à-vis Veblen, as a human
instinct over ‘çıkar ilişkileri’ (exploitive relations) that is the learned habit of ‘exploit’
where one uses another for their own ends. The latter term is used more frequently
today than in the past in Turkey.
Due to the growing anticipation of another war, when Linke journeyed further
east from Erzurum to the military zone near the Soviet border, she faced stringent
control and surveillance, a precautionary measure to secure Turkey’s national borders.
Visiting provincial towns of Kars and Ardahan as well as Sarıkamış—former
battleground between the Russians and Ottomans in 1915—Linke immediately met an
authoritarian tone. She admitted: ‘Kars was a fortress, and they were not going to let
any silly adventurer do anything foolish in it’ (AD 79). President İsmet İnönü made a
journey to the region and bluntly concluded: ‘Nothing but hunger and misery’ (AD 79)!
In fact, following a government probe on conditions in the east, twelve mayors were
sacked. Linke recalled: ‘I was told something about new factories in those regions, and
the intention of helping the eastern provinces by allotting them a greater share in the
second five-year plan’ (AD 80-81). But why were factories not built in certain regions?
Tuna provides several logical answers, beginning with geographical factors. ‘After
researching locations for the factory around Iğdır, Van and Erzurum, the latter was
chosen for its diverse water resources considered more advantageous for logistical
reasons’ (p. 152). Not only in the east but also in the west consideration was given to
where factories should be situated. After debate with the Soviets, İnönü decided:
We didn’t want it [factory] to be on the coastline. Considering the military build-up of the
period, we objected to constructing factories directly within firing range from the sea. I clearly
stated to Professor Orlof that we thought the factory should be located in the interior regions of
the country. He agreed we were right, but the distance from the coastline should only be as far as
Karabük to ensure its efficiency. If we built it further into the interior, it wouldn’t be
economically efficient and we would have too many problems, whereas, the opinion of our
soldier friends was the opposite. They insisted the factory be built, not in Karabük but farther
inland than that (p. 221).
112
A caravansary is an inn where former Silk Route travellers stopped for replenishment on journeys.
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Decisions were rational and pragmatic to efficiently safeguard industrial production
from foreign attack in war. The fate of a nation is largely determined by geographical
location and borders shared with neighboring nations.
In the military zone of the northeast, an insubordinate Linke—possibly risking
her life to meet the people—was soon confronted by a young Turkish man she called
the ‘American’. He reminded her of an American she once met in Berlin (AD 82).
Fighting against the Arabs and taken prisoner by the British in 1917, the American’s
favorite word was ‘permission’ (AD 83). He shadowed Linke everywhere. No different
in Ardahan, she was greeted by an officer Tewfik (Tevfik). When Tevfik departed for
another town, Linke was soon chaperoned by Tevfik’s friend Lieutenant Mahmut. Yet
Linke stubbornly walked around the town alone and even entered a peasant hut.
Mahmut entered after her. With patchy French he questioned: ‘Why are you here? […]
Do you speak Russian’ (AD 107)? Infuriated, she retorted: ‘Damn your soldiers. To
walk along the road, forbidden! Visit peasants—forbidden! Mountains forbidden! Is
there anything I can do without your protest’ (AD 109)? Determined to leave Ardahan
but having to wait six more days for a kamion she returned to the small hotel she stayed
and rudely demanded of the man at the desk (otelci) he bring her a donkey for
transportation. The next day the man placed a foal on her lap and joked: ‘It’s a present.
Didn’t you want a donkey’ (AD 111)? They all burst out laughing together.
What does Linke teach her reader about this odd series of events? First, there
was a real and immense fear Linke was a spy. Blond and blue-eyed her appearance
would have attracted suspicion unsure whether she was of Russian, German or British
origin. Second, the authorities although monitoring Linke’s every move, did not do so
in an oppressive manner but rather with an odd kind of parental bent that worked to
ensure her safety. Third, local townsmen, despite the bleak ‘situation’ in which they
lived, cultivated a sense of humor Linke noticed and appreciated. In Turkish the
expression ‘eşol eşek’ literally means ‘son of a donkey’, a derogatory term. With this
joke, they made their point clear about Linke’s inconsiderate behaviour but did not do
so in an offensive manner. I doubt Linke was completely aware of the compromised
position she put both herself and others in, yet, she had insubordinately worked hard to
illustrate obstacles Turkey faced sharing a contentious border with the Soviets as war
approached. Fourth, Linke’s use of ‘American’—consciously or unconsciously—
alluded to something American about the circumstances that might indicate a criticism
based on German experiences of the inflation and American-style cultural intervention.
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Leaving Ardahan, Linke traveled in another kamion with a driver named Nuri.
‘Of all the simple men in Anatolia, he was the one I like best’ (AD 117). Their
destination was Hopa, a small town on the Black Sea. The kamion continuously broke
down as a result of near non-existent roads in the region. This gave her the chance to
witness fellow travellers good humor when they laughed at an old religious man (hoca)
whose hat had blown off in the wind. ‘The hoca has lost his hat—the hoca has lost his
hat! The air trembled with their laughter’ (AD 135). ‘“Hah, Babacığım,” said Nuri,
slapping him on the shoulder, “there you see at last what your Allah does for you. Well,
don’t worry, he who has been drenched, need no longer be afraid of the rain”’ (AD 136).
Linke laughed along with them. Turkish culture couches a keen sense of humor
stretching millenniums and more recently, from the tales of Nasrettin Hoca—thirteenth
century Sufi wise man and philosopher—to shadow puppetry of Karagöz and Ortaoyun
plays. The issue of losing ones hat was dire in this case, as the hat law (1925) required
men wear the fedora. The reason for this was to make all citizens equal and not judged
or divided by certain religious headgear (AD 30). Nuri’s joke was proof of the younger
generation’s disdain for religion.
Arriving in Borçka—a town midway between Artvin and Hopa—they met the
ministry of public works building a bridge across the Çoruh River, supervised by
several Czech engineers for the Skoda-works. The European engineers invited Linke to
stay overnight and continue on the next day. She declined the offer. ‘I knew that I had to
go on with the men on the kamion until we had reached the end of the journey’ she
admitted, whereas the engineers had not ‘demanded this loyalty and would not miss me
if I stayed behind’ (AD 138-39). Her choice was intuitive. Fellow passengers would
have read her decision to stay with the Europeans as abandonment of not seeing the
journey through together. Linke went on: ‘And yet I belonged to them [kamion
travellers], though I would never be able to explain why, least of all to the engineers.
They were much too sober-headed and European to understand’ (AD 138). The
engineers stared in amazement as Linke drove off with the peasants. Unable to explain
her actions, the following excerpt has much to say about a sense of emancipation in her
decision. ‘It was one of those rare moments when you believe that it is in your power to
fly merely by spreading out your arms’ (AD 138). This excerpt holds particular weight
and deserves further investigation.
On the surface it may be read not wanting to abandon those with whom she
cultivated an alliance of shared experience of hardship, however brief. Seeing it from
another angle, it might be a feminine gesture to which Slavoj Žižek provides insight.
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The traumatic deadlock of Hitler’s Germany constituted symptomatic false acts of
paranoia, violence and hysteria, expressed in hatred of socialists, communists and Jews.
In false acts Hitler attempted to restore the function of Germany, what Linke called
‘abandoning the great ideals of humanity’. But if there are false Acts there are also
authentic Acts to break the symptom and the superego. For Žižek an authentic Act is
not neutral but radical, most often performed in feminine gesture (1999). Here, I equate
Linke’s Act of rejecting the Europeans an authentic one. I suggest she symbolically
killed the German and European in her authentic act to embrace the Turkish people. In
so doing, she took from Germany and Europe what was most precious, the German and
European notion of being a superior race and civilization. Her Act was a genuine
attempt to redefine herself and her identity by subverting her German one. In so doing,
Linke preserved the dignity of her life. Oddly, it might be espoused a kind of Christian
rebirth but this act carries more heritage. Socrates logic of ‘I must return to my roots,
it’s already deep in me the truth of my unconscious desire, I just must realize my inner
self’ is a kind of symbolic suicide when you become another person (Žižek 1999).
Linke, employing her multi-perspectival view by using narrative juxtapositions,
offered another thought. Upon reaching Hopa she parted with fellow travellers only to
contradict her earlier statement. ‘These men had only been companions for a short
journey. In the long run, my place was not at their side, but at that of the engineers. I
belonged to Europe, Nuri and the hocas to Eastern Anatolia. There was no pride or
consolation in the thought’ (AD 139). Puzzled, the reader is left to ponder why she
chose to side with the ‘engineer’ in the end. Moreover what did she mean by ‘too soberheaded and European to understand’? Of this obvious contradiction, I suggest she
directed a message to both. Europeans must change their habit of assuming themselves
superior and Eastern Anatolians must continue their road of evolution for Turkey’s
sake, such that the two might equally contribute to civilization. Her key use of the word
‘loyalty’ is important because in eastern Anatolia, in particular, one of the most crucial
problems is loyalty to clan and the ağa (landlord). Thus, Turkish leaders and Linke
seem placed in-between as progenitors of this cultural evolution away from the loyalty
of clan to the maturity of being a citizen in a nation proper. I now turn to Veblen’s ideas
on engineers and their emancipatory role.
Veblen’s ‘Soviet of Technicians’
The industrial system was a progressive development for Veblen because it was
a system of production that could supply much-needed goods and meet human
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necessities. He did not share the concerns about alienation and the coarseness of
production as did William Morris nor did he think a revival of cottage industries could
meet the scale of human necessity for the twentieth century. What troubled Veblen was
that industry was not managed efficiently. Industrial output was managed inefficiently
at the hands of the Vested Interests who had no knowledge about industry or interest in
community good. They sabotaged industry by slowing production—keeping workers
idle—to maintain high prices and low output of goods necessary for the community.
Thus, those who produced the industrial output (common man) for the benefit of the
whole had no control over the process. In the making since the Industrial Revolution,
under the hands of the British gentlemen, they evolved into Absentee Landlords
completely divorced from industry. The Americans followed suit. ‘This captain of
industry, typified by the corporation financier, and latterly by the investment banker, is
one of the institutions that go to make up the new order of things’ (Veben 1921/2001:
21). Price fixers or ‘experts in prices and profits and financial manoeuvres […] the final
discretion in all questions of industrial policy continues to rest in their hands’ (p. 26).
Adding to the misery, corporate finance also trafficked in credit under a ‘quasisyndicate of banking interests’ (p. 32) resulting in exponential waste in industry—waste
of human labor, resources and equipment (p. 28). With extraordinary prescience Veblen
underlined how alleged civilized cultures reverted to barbarism—in the ‘Era of the
Investment Banker’ (p. 29). Unavoidably the industrial system was forced to work at
cross-purposes, especially when special advantage was given to one nation that upset
the industrial output of the rest. Since industrialization was the driving force of the
twentieth century, we arrive at a conundrum.
In search of solutions, Veblen analyzed what role the new species of experts had
in the industrial process. He put his faith in the experts and technicians because he
trusted them as ‘efficiency engineers’. Here, ‘efficiency’ refers to the earlier ‘moral’
efficiency at the outset of the chapter that seeks to work for betterment of the whole. It
refers neither to ‘technocratic elitism’ nor ‘technological determinism’ from critics who
misread Veblen. In Veblen’s words: ‘Industrial experts, engineers, chemists,
mineralogists, technicians of all kinds, have been drifting into more responsible
positions in the industrial system and have been growing up and multiplying within the
system, because the system will no longer work at all without them’ (p. 29). Experts
trained at the hands of the community, responsible to ensure an efficient industrial
system, employed their instinct that abhors waste. But engineers and technicians worked
for Vested Interests as a kept class. Senior engineers were already complacent to serve
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‘commercial profit’ (p. 46) but younger engineers, Veblen predicted, would become
class conscious to question if community needs were met and ask: ‘What about it’ (p.
45)? In-between facilitators, if you will, young engineers were best placed to recognize
‘corporation finance is a tissue of make-believe’ (p. 47) and instead assert themselves as
‘efficiency engineers’ (p. 45) to oust financiers. They could bring ‘friction’ to the
industrial system (p. 46). Veblen advised the following action:
a general strike of the technological specialists in industry need involve no more than a minute
fraction of one per cent, of the population; yet it would swiftly bring a collapse of the old order
and sweep the timeworn fabric of finance and absentee sabotage into the discard for good and
all. Such a catastrophe would doubtless be deplorable. It would look something like the end of
the world to all those persons who take their stand with the kept classes (p. 51).
Veblen had little hope any of this would come to fruition in America or Britain. ‘The
long history of British gentlemanly compromise, collusion, conciliation, and popular
defeat, is highly instructive on that head’ thus ‘Bolshevism is not a present menace to
the Vested Interests in America’ (p. 55). Business managed to take ‘syndicates, trusts,
pools, combinations, interlocking directorates, gentlemen’s agreements, employers’
unions’ into the fold (p. 77). ‘By settled habit, the American population are quite unable
to see their way to entrust any appreciable responsibility to any other than business
men’ (p. 93). Only ‘irresponsible wayfaring men’ of the I.W.W. posed a genuine threat
to capitalism for Veblen (p. 57) because if common man united on an international scale
they might wield substantial clout against the vested interests.
For Veblen the Russian ‘situation’ was different. Not yet fully industrialized,
Russia had not been corrupted by the Industrial system run by business civilization in
America and Britain. The Russian empire, did briefly dabble in this folly. Rieber (1990)
points out Catherine the Great placed industry in private hands but her son and
successor Paul I (1754-1801) reversed the policy, placing it back in state hands to serve
the people (p. 540). A small colony of French engineers in St. Petersburg, led by Henri
Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), advanced the ideology of industrialism in the
Russian empire (p. 551). Saint-Simon’s ‘engineer as the liberator of mankind’ excited
Russian engineers. Like Veblen, Rieber recognized the difference between the AngloAmerican industrial system and that of continental Europe.
The rise of the Russian engineering profession, like the French, diverges sharply from the
Anglo-American tradition of free and independent, technically trained specialists operating in
the economic milieu of market capitalism. Rather, it takes its ethical and organizational
inspiration from another source: the belief that the professions offer a way of life morally
superior to the marketplace (p. 539).
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By 1840 the engineering profession was established in the Russian empire (p. 563).
Military schools were the first to teach engineering (p. 549). Despite high regard for
European technology, Russian engineers did not want foreigners laying her railways
and rejected an ‘emerging alliance of bankers and engineers among the French St.
Simonians’ (p. 560). Pavel Petrovich Melnikov (1804-1880), an astute Russian
engineer-administrator, laid railways across Imperial Russia (p. 539). Both Imperial
Russia and the Soviet regime fought to stave off parasitic infiltration of their industrial
system that echoes Veblen’s argument for the primacy of engineers. Rieber stated: ‘The
[Russian] engineers felt a deep obligation to put their special knowledge at the service
of the society, guided by their professional conscience. Their education and their careers
mutually reinforced their collective belief that technology was the solution to social
problems’ (p. 563). Rieber held the Russian opinion was that railroads would compress
time and space to unite the ‘brotherhood of man’ (p. 552). Industry and technology
would bring peace over war. Railways would connect eastern and western civilization
(p. 555). Skeptical the French might exploit technology to infiltrate the Russian
empire—following the bitter experience of Napoleon—they agreed without industry
they would be mere ‘onlookers’ and find themselves ‘at the tail end of Europe’ (p. 556).
Veblen proposed the Soviet advantage relied on its ‘earlier, simpler, less closeknit plan of productive industry’ (1921/2001: 60)—perhaps an idea similar to
Chayanov. He argued Russian ‘home production does not involve an “industrial
system”’ and was protected from outside interference (p. 60). Although Anglo-America
tried to subdue the Bolsheviks using reactionary forces from the Ukraine, Finland and
Poland (p. 61), instead of Anglo-American ‘commercial imbecility’ (p. 63), Soviet
moral superiority worked for a ‘modern civilized community’ (p. 62), what Veblen
called a ‘Soviet of Technicians’ (p. 83). Action and practice to better future generations
was Veblen’s premise, perhaps modeled after Bellamy’s 1888 socialist utopian novel
Looking Backwards that favored ‘industrial evolution’ (Bellamy 2009: 29). Setting the
novel in the year 2000, Bellamy postulated evolution had changed societies old habits to
embrace the reasoning, as he put it, that ‘no business is so essentially the public
business as the industry and commerce on which the people’s livelihood depends, and
that to entrust it to private persons to be managed for private profit is a folly’ (p. 33).
Regarding the role of the engineer from a Turkish perspective, I return briefly to
the Ottoman Empire where a similar development occurred as with the Russians. Öncü
(2015) explains the role of the engineer in the Empire.
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The first mühendis [engineer] schools, Bahr-i Hümayun (1773) and Mühendishane-i Berr-i
Hümayun (1795) were founded as military schools to generate a new group of officers who were
supposed to know modern science and technologies developed in the west, and apply these in the
organizations and activities of the state and the military. The underlying aim was to catch up
swiftly with the technologically superior western states, and thereby reverse the decline of the
Ottoman Empire. […] In this sense, the engineer was intentionally created as a ‘savior’ by the
state with an unambiguous political mission (p. 269-79).
Engineers’ cultural inheritance as saviors of the state carried over to the early
Republican era, had the same resilient ‘political mission’ for a rational industrial order.
Eighty-five engineers—scant few left in the Republic—largely graduates from the
Mühendis Mekteb-i Alisi later renamed İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi (Istanbul Technical
University) founded the Union of Turkish Master Engineers (UTME) on 26 April 1926;
the first organization for Turkish engineers (Öncü 2003: 93). Şükrü Er, an aeronautics
engineer graduated from the faculty of mechanical engineering at Istanbul Technical
University (1948), was a pioneer of the engineering movement in the 1950s (p. 103). In
his essay ‘The Role of The Engineer in Civilized Life’ (1993), Er proposed to
understand the engineer one must understand civilization. Civilization is complex
because, ‘factors such as affluence, wealth, independence, or technical superiority do
not suffice to define civilization (p. 105). Citing Kuwait as an example, such oil rich
countries cannot be civilized because they pay no tax and get funds from sheikhs (p.
105) whose industrial production is run by foreign ‘experts’. Like the British Absentee
landlords, Arabs have no knowledge of industry, if we look at it from Veblen’s point of
view. Er sees the engineer as a researcher, leader and educator (p. 106-08). Engineers
provide society with ‘wisdom and an ability to judge and appreciate values clearly’ (p.
108). Moreover, engineers work collaboratively with others in multi-faceted tasks to
create a ‘project’ and are better placed for ‘self-realization’ (p. 108). I equate engineers
with film directors, who too, juggle and manage sets, actors, equipment, budgets and
temporal factors. As film directors, engineers too, have the potential for self-realization.
Self-realization takes on a new form of ‘life skills’ (p. 108). Skills learned and shared
cultivate others self-realization that expands the cultural evolution of the Republic.
From the mid-1950s onward, Er was concerned about the infiltration of ‘profit-making’
entrepreneurs and commercialism into the industrial process. Presciently he put it: ‘The
fate of the country is the fate of the engineers’ (p. 109). Familiarized with the
emancipatory role of engineers from a Turkish perspective, I turn to Linke’s narratives
for insight into how the Soviet way of doing was reshaped by Turkish engineer praxis to
advance Turkey’s cultural evolution. The exploration will not be a technical reading of
engineer praxis but one of cultural nuances directed at betterment of the whole.
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Fortunate Encounters With Engineers
The first person Linke met on her journey from Istanbul to Samsun by ferry was
a Turkish engineer Nejat. This was fortunate because Linke met many more engineers
who, in particular, taught her their emancipatory role in laying the groundwork for
national efficiency. Like the Soviets, Turkish industry—on the way to becoming—had a
moral vision to solve social problems and ensure national sovereignty. Turkish
engineers built roads, bridges, railways, schools, hospitals, power stations and forged
innovative agricultural methods to improve efficiency for their present and future
generations. The Samsun mayor told Linke: ‘The people’s interests come first […]
Their comfort is more important than the profit of some unscrupulous individual’ (AD
159). While some Turkish engineers studied abroad (AD 309), they had not yet been
habituated to the institution of ‘pecuniary gain’. They still had ‘common sense’. Linke
thought they might ambitiously ‘climb’. ‘They knew their knowledge and services were
needed at home, and seeing comparatively young men in responsible positions, they
were now impatient and could not climb quickly enough’ (AD 309). The director of the
Kayseri Kombinat told Linke an overly ambitious engineer could ‘spoil the atmosphere
of the whole factory’ (AD 309). Might a divergence in engineers, see some work for
common good and others for ‘pecuniary gain’?
The textile Kombinat in Kayseri was the first project of its scale in the industrial
Five-Year-Plan with the Soviets. Turkish Sümerbank provided the equivalent of over
one million pounds while the Russians crafted factory plans and supplied machinery on
twenty-year interest free credit (AD 308). Over seventy young mechanics were trained
in Russia as foremen for the Kombinat (AD 307). Bay Ziya a young engineer, showed
Linke the ‘spinning department, the power-station, the future entrance-gate, the offices,
the weaving shed, the sports grounds’ and introduced her to the director Bay Fazil113
who greeted her with ‘Güten Abend!’ (AD 301). Formerly from the military, Fazıl was
trained as an engineer in Switzerland (AD 302). Linke quickly noticed ‘everybody
connected with the factory seemed to be young’ (AD 304). Another engineer discussed
with Linke the two thousand building workers—peasant and casual—who proved
difficult to discipline. He suggested, ‘there was no better chance for social studies than
watching these men arriving for their working day’ (AD 303). Linke witnessed their
deplorable conditions, sleeping in hovels and under soiled quilts and the disarray in
which they gathered for work; unaccustomed to new schemes of ‘check-clocks’ and
worker identification numbers. Karaömerlioğlu drew a parallel between Soviet and
113
The correct typesetting is Fazıl.
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Turkish style ‘Stakhanovism’ (1998a: 59).114 Stakhanovism—taken from the name of a
Russian miner Stakhanov from the Donbass region who continuously surpassed
production records—became an ideological campaign for the Soviets. ‘Faith in the
power of human will, voluntarism, and work with enthusiasm, devotion, diligence, and
passion were perceived as the panacea to solve the problems of rural Turkey,
particularly the problem of low productivity’ (p. 60). Linke emphasized the difficulty of
disciplining workers, as did Karaömerlioğlu. ‘[W]hat the Turkish rural economy lacked
was not hard work and enthusiasm itself but a hard work supported by a notion of time,
discipline and consistent productivity’ (p. 60-61). Linke noted the engineers were
facilitators to this end, but was this all?
As if in conversation with the reader Linke asked: ‘Would the experiment
succeed’ (AD 303-04)? Pressing the engineer about future plans, he stated:
The sports grounds will take up all that area from those fences to the hut over there on the right.
They’ll be ready soon after the factory is completed. Our workers will then be able to swim, and
play football, and tennis, and we’ll have horses and a proper riding-school, and also an up-todate ground for light athletics. And the swimming-pool will be close to the exit-gates so that
they may feel tempted to have a dip before they go home (AD 306).
When Linke and the engineer looked out across the expanse of the future factory they
saw Bay Fazıl leading over two hundred workers in morning exercise drills (AD 306).
Perhaps stupefied, Linke remained silent. The engineer added: ‘It’s an exact replica of
the stadium at Cologne’ (AD 306).
Here we encounter a collaborative goal of the Soviets, who drew up the plans,
and the Turks, who implemented them in their own way, to emulate whom they both
reasoned the most industrially advanced in Europe: Germany. But as Turkey was not
Germany, nor was her leader like Hitler, was monetary expenditure on amenities an
inefficient use of funds on ‘wasteful and useless living’? What does this have to do with
‘parental bent’? Linke captured Bay Fazıl’s end goal. In German he told her:
Perhaps you think it foolish to play football in this hot town. You are right. But I don’t want it
really for the sake of sport. They’ll be forced to wear shorts and show their naked knees, and
that’s what matters to me. Once they dare to appear in public like that, they’ve broken away
from tradition and are free (AD 307).
Veblen’s assertion that industry swept away religious superstitions and rituals to replace
them with matter-of-fact knowledge comes to mind. In the following excerpt Linke
worked to persuade her reader of the director’s long-term goal. Bay Fazıl explained:
What I want more than anything else […] is real comradeship, the feeling that we are all one
114
He used Village Institutes (1937-1945) as a reference, not yet established in 1935.
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family from the director down to the last apprentice. It ought to be possible since here in Turkey
the State is the most important entrepreneur. The few existing capitalists don’t really matter, and
in any case, they, too, are controlled by the State. If we take care from the outset not to create an
exploited proletariat, if we make our workers feel that this factory belongs to the state and,
therefore, to themselves, and if we really keep all doors open to them to advance—why
shouldn’t we succeed? […] We are prepared to learn from anyone, but we haven’t the least
intention of selling our souls either to Fascists or Communists. None of the seventy boys who
went to Russia has become a Bolshie. We just brought back a sackful of experience (Emphasis
added, AD 308-09).
Here an alternative conclusion can be drawn to Karaömerlioğlu, in that, engineer aims
were not only about discipline and high productivity, but rather collective activity and
fraternization, however not of ‘Bolshie’ color. In their collaboration with the Soviets,
one is left astounded how the youth—rapidly losing sense of religious tradition under
secularism—did not turn Bolshevik but maintained a good friendship with Russia.
Writing on English state formation as a cultural revolution, Corrigan and Sayer
(1985: 197) assert that ‘social integration within the nation state is a project; and one in
constant jeopardy from the very facts of material difference... whose recognition official
discourse seeks to repress’. In the Turkish case, the concrete project of a new cultural
habituation through social integration of work (within the abstract notion of state) was
in the process of evolving to overcome ‘material difference’ that could not yet be fully
solved due to the global economic crisis of the interwar period, and with a Turkish
industrial system still in its infancy. Despite these contradictions, the engineers’ parental
bent, I argue, represents a stark difference—moral and ethical supremacy—to vulgar
exploitation of the vested interests, under the abstract of national interest that does little
for common man. But Turkey’s ‘third way’ should not imply it was void of Marxist
thought or a Left either in the Ottoman Empire or after 1923.115 By subverting the Left
with a modified ‘third way’—Étatism in the 1930s—progenitors of the early Turkish
industrial system cultivated their own style of a ‘Soviet of Technicians’ evident in the
narrative of Fazıl. The ‘third way’ liberated the Turkish state from the machinations of
fascism, communism and capitalism. In short, they borrowed knowledge without letting
it rule them. Engineers worked toward a cultural (r)evolution by cultivating these mixed
modes of production to shape new habits and bring about gradual social change without
force or violence. In state-run industry, amenities and facilities were to persuade and
invite workers to join in sports and group activities to build a more open society. This
would cultivate solidarity to overcome religious and superstitious rituals that otherwise
115
Turkish Communist leader Mustafa Suphi (1883-1921) attended the First Congress of the Communist
Party in Turkey, in Baku on the 10 September 1920. When their delegation of 15 tried to return, they
were met with hostility in Erzurum. Sourcing another means of return they set sail from Trabzon but
their boat capsized killing all on board on 28 January 1921.
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hindered fraternity, a remainder of ethnic hatred propagated between 1876 and WWI
after Ottoman bankruptcy. State-run industries might also set a good example to private
enterprises that tended to be more exploitative of their workers. Linke added: ‘They had
also to be taught to educate and lead their fellow-workers without thinking themselves
their bosses’ but in a way that would not lead to mass revolt to derail, the then, fragile
industrial system. Linke was well aware of the contradiction. ‘I knew better than to ask
him [Bay Fazıl] why strikes and lock-outs were forbidden’ (AD 308). Akkaya (2002)
confirms labor laws in the 1930s and 40s prohibited the ‘constitution of associations on
a class basis’—labor unions—under provisions of the Law of Associations (p. 131).
Linke informed the reader plans were in place for ‘educational experiments’.
They planned, for instance, to have a special factory newspaper, edited by a group of workers,
open to free criticism of anything and anybody so long as the critics would stand up for their
views. A drama, cinema, photography group would be formed. In the canteen an honours list
would be hung up, naming those workers who had distinguished themselves in the factory or on
the sports ground. And, most ambitious enterprise of all, the workers would be encouraged to
run a co-operative society where they could get their food and clothing at cheap prices (AD 309).
But Fazıl expressed the engineers concern it might ‘undermine their authority over the
foreman and workers if this kind of fraternizing went on’ (AD 309). Considering their
still fragile industrial system and peasants who were undisciplined and without a longterm vision, it was wise and necessary to take these precautions. Presciently Linke
concluded: ‘It was a question to be discussed in ten or fifteen years’ time’ (AD 308).
Countless young engineers dedicated themselves to the state, often working for
long periods in distant places without a break. Bilal, an engineer working on the
Simeryol (Sivas-Malatya-Erzurum) railroad line explained: ‘We work every blasted
day, Sundays included, from morning till night. […] I haven’t had a day off for thirteen
months’ (AD 182-83). Turkey wanted to replace, as soon as possible, foreign engineers
with Turkish ones. ‘This tunnel was one of the few places where a foreigner, an
Austrian engineer, was still in charge of the work’ (AD 187). Linke met Herr Gugler. In
this mountainous region under blazing heat, she learned men and even women worked
at backbreaking railroad construction (AD 187). She questioned Gugler: ‘What do you
think of them—as workers?’ He responded: ‘They are alright, industrious, obedient,
careful with the dynamite. […] We keep men from different regions as much as possible
in separate tents. They come from nearly all over Turkey—heaven knows how they find
their way here’ (AD 188-89). Linke pressed him whether workers wages were fair.
‘Certainly—at least eighty piasters per day […] and the dynamite workers earn up to a
hundred and thirty’ (AD 189). Gugler accused Bilal of putting on ‘superior airs’ in front
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of the workers adding ‘they can’t stand that’ (AD 191). He insisted Bilal viewed
peasants ‘wicked’. Opening out a map of Anatolia Bilal made a larger point.
The great aim of our Government is to open up those parts of Anatolia which were completely
neglected under the Sultans. We want to give an equal chance to all parts of the country. The
Black Sea and the Mediterranean have already been linked. The work in the Western provinces
is nearly completed. Now the great drive is directed eastward. Our line forms part of this work
and will be an important link between the two main lines. […] It will bring about a complete
economic and cultural revolution. You need only think of one fact to have an illustration: until
quite recently the lack of communication with the interior forced us to import foreign grain to
feed the population of our ports. Now we are not only able to supply them from the granaries of
Central Anatolia, but we can even export wheat and other cereals ourselves (AD 191).
Linke concluded of Bilal, ‘he sincerely believed in the future of his country and that he
was happy to take part in the work of construction in spite of the sacrifices it demanded
of him’ (AD 192). I suggest his emancipatory ideals as an engineer envisioned an
industrial future with moral and ethical values of ‘common good’, over the vulgar
dictatorship of ‘pecuniary gain’. Linke’s narrative is a pedagogical truth of their moral
vision and the confidence with which they worked on their own terms with minimum
foreign intervention. Peasants and engineers formed the ‘human hands which work and
working, transform the world’, in the Freirian sense.
In her ‘Notes to Chapter IV’ Linke documented how the Simeryol was the first
private Turkish company laying tracks on the north-south line for the government and
the only private line of its kind. Exclusively foreign companies—also granted resource
ownership rights on minerals and oil, within a specified distance from each line—had
once built railways in the Ottoman Empire (Birdal p. 97). After 1923 all lines were
nationalized except for the Fevzipaşa-Nuseybin five hundred kilometer line on the
Syrian frontier (AD 192). In 1924, Turkey had built no lines herself but by 1935 over
1,643 kilometers of railway had been built.
Linke appreciated their ‘experiment’ with communes in some regions of Turkey.
During her stay in Malatya in the southeast, she visited the Gündüzbey commune, a
village with four hundred houses that connected a larger swath of twenty-five villages
and hamlets (AD 202). In 1928, German engineers had fitted the village electric works
with Siemens turbines (AD 202). The village head (muhtar) had been re-elected with
over fifty percent of the vote indicative common man was pleased with his performance
in the community. Funding provided by the Bank Ottomane at very low interest rates
allowed the commune to prosper. The mayor explained, ‘the commune was building up
on its own initiative and with no financial or other help from outside’ (AD 203). Of her
experiences there Linke wrote:
207
The revenue of the communal property—fields, a large orchard, and a grocery-shop—were
nearly enough to provide all the necessary funds. They had just spent a thousand liras on a field
a little out of the village where they wanted to lay out a model nursery of especially chosen fruittrees which later on would be distributed free of charge. The muhtar would be responsible for it,
and the vali [mayor] promised that the vilayet [provincial] director of agriculture would keep in
close touch with him and give him careful advice (AD 203).
Linke was not content to accept all as credible. Upon visiting a second commune İsmet
Paşa—named after the president born there—scenes contradicted her earlier jubilance.
Had an ‘inconsiderate’ government made itself visible? Disappointed Linke wrote:
When I entered they turned their colourless faces up to me without speaking. The scene was a
strange contrast to the exuberant life outside and as sad and depressing as if the men were
weaving their own shrouds. It took them twelve hours to produce a piece of cloth ten or eleven
yards in length and to earn a net sum of sixty piasters—something like two shillings. Three
hundred of these weaving looms were still in existence at Ismet Pasha (AD 204).116
To dissuade the reader from drawing immediate negative conclusions, she added:
‘During the course of 1936 the foundation stone will be laid at Malatya for a huge stateowned cotton-factory, large enough to produce about a quarter of the total Turkish
consumption’ (AD 204). Careful to ask how peasant craftsmen might react to the new
industry in their shift to factory workers, the mayor responded: ‘Atılan ok geri
dönmez—the arrow set flying cannot return’ (AD 204). Had an ill-willed Orientalist
written the narrative, habit would have portrayed Turkey lagging behind, mistreating
workers under a dictator and so on. As a ‘lively intellect’ Linke’s narrative showed the
reader a new way of seeing, in that, the government worked with concrete aims to make
the lives of common man easier in the future. Production was not sabotaged by the
Vested Interests of corporation financiers.
Turkey’s most advanced men were educated in the military, where they received
the best education available making them well positioned to theorize and practice
efficient methods of organization and industry. At first glance, this form of governance
might appear to undermine individual agency, however, as Linke’s narratives reveal, it
also opened up possibilities for individual agency to partake in the process of working
for the betterment of the whole. For instance, while the military might be considered a
repressive apparatus to discipline the populace, there may also exist possibilities to
work for common good in the institution. Hasan, a twenty-two year old common soldier
had just completed his military service. Sharing his stories with Linke led her to
conclude ‘the army had taught him other things—discipline, cleanliness, a sense of
time, improved methods for cultivating the land, reading and writing and—perhaps the
most important of all—a feeling of responsibility for his fellow-men’ (AD 123). This
116
The correct typesetting is İsmet Paşa.
208
would indicate, rather then a killing machine for Vested Interests of business
civilization, the army in early Republican Turkey had a progressive function. Linke
wrote of a major in Erzurum who took her to see a new road being built from Trabzon
to Tabriz (Iran). ‘He was one of those who believe that with technique, organization,
and discipline everything can be done’, she noted (AD 70). When they spotted an
animal carcass on the ‘first class road’ and the peasants had neglected to remove it, he
said in a ‘fatherly voice’: ‘Haven’t you noticed the carcass out there on the road?’ (AD
71). Linke wrote the following of the relation between the major and the peasants:
His methods were simple and direct—he appealed to what he thought the men’s best instincts by
speaking to them like this: “Here you are wasting your days in idle gossip, letting your wives
slave for you and your children, instead of acting as responsible men. Aren’t you strong and
healthy? Haven’t you heard that we are living in a Republic now? The Sultan is gone. This land,
this country are your own today, and you let it be covered with carcasses and infested with flies.
I took this young lady out to show her the new road which the Republic has given you. […]
Shame on you that you let Turkey down like this” (AD 71).
On their return, the peasants had cleared the road. He applauded them, ‘Brava, my
sons’. Linke’s choice of the words ‘fatherly’ and ‘best instincts’ offers much insight on
parental bent when coupled with ‘responsibility’. Fazıl’s intention to cultivate the value
‘we are all one family’ is commensurate with the major’s praxis. The idea a modern
nation be structured on the institution of ‘family’ might seem odd when European
nations were founded on the abstract idea of equal citizens under the law. In the case of
Turkey, where habituation to living together for millenniums was the cultural norm, it
seems a pragmatic decision to employ the metaphor of ‘family’ to ‘instinctively’ make
the abstract notion of nation more viable to knit citizens together. I liken it to a
responsible, benevolent ‘father’ who wants his children to succeed and to do so he
gently guides them to make their own way, albeit responsibly. Describing these military
men as ‘patriotic liberals’, Linke confided to the reader their practice wasn’t a ‘military
dictatorship ruling over the country’ but the ‘outcome of this earlier politisation of the
army which brought about a passionate belief in reform. […] As a German Republican,
I cannot help admiring the Turkish generals’ (AD 72). Rather than ‘honorary office’ or
glorification of pomp and circumstance rituals and traditions as in Britain or Europe,
Linke’s experience captured the Turkish ‘parental bent’ and their sense of responsibility
toward the peasants; ‘sahip çıkmak’ (take responsibility). Thus every reform undertaken
was a means to cultivate the habit of living in a Republic as a family but as a member,
to which one was responsible to concretely contribute. This praxis staved off Bolshevist
aims of internationalism and later prevented Stalinism from incorporating Turkey into
the USSR (Olson and İnce 1977: 228). Osman Okyar concluded of Étatism:
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My own belief is that, on balance during the twenty-five years of its existence, the advantages
and benefits, visible as well as invisible (external economies, training of man-power, etc.) have
far outweighed the disadvantages, in the sense that Turkey would be generally well behind
where she is to-day if Étatism had never been introduced (1965: 103).
Okyar allows for the question of whether the experiment in the 1930s could work as a
future economic system, which to my mind, would be a more fair and rational economic
system than that of repetitive neo-liberalism and imperialism that relies on ‘masters of
financial intrigue’, the enterprise of ‘land-grabbing’ and trade in armaments. But more
than this, I am interested in the philosophical and sociological motives that underpin
Étatism that might be evocable today. In other words, it would require us to imagine
becoming morally or ethically better to create a better world, as a kind of ‘anticipatory
illumination’ Bloch proposed and Veblen saw possible in the ‘Soviet of Technicians’.
Looking at it from this angle, it is obvious that Étatism created a mixed economy, the two
sectors of which it will always be difficult to integrate fully and harmoniously, in the sense of
subjecting them both to a common standard and common rules of the game. The problem is to
make them into partners, rivals perhaps, but contented rivals, without constant complaints as to
the fairness of the game, instead of two enemies, constantly critical of each other and constantly
trying to destroy each other. With all the good will in the world, we cannot say that Étatism and
the mixed economy have achieved this in Turkey, whatever else they may have achieved (Okyar
p. 103).
Nevertheless, as Linke witnessed Étatism in practice, she drew a positive conclusion.
Linke visited the port city of Izmir (Aegean coast). Bedriye, a woman she might
have met at the Eskişehir Halkevi (People’s House), gave Linke the name of a relative
in Izmir; Bay Salih Şükrü (AD 284). ‘Bay Şükrü was a quiet sober-headed man with a
deep interest in European politics, thereby differing from most of the men I had met
during the past weeks who were chiefly concerned with Turkish affairs. Not without
reason had the Ottomans spoke of Izmir as the ‘eye of Asia Minor’ (AD 285). That
evening Bay Şükrü and his wife took Linke to a concert performance by Soviet artists
touring the Republic (AD 285). Such concerts were common. Turkish President İsmet
İnönü collaborated with the Soviets to showcase Soviet and Turkish art and culture.
In 1932-33 Soviet film directors Sergei Iutkevich and Esfir Shub visited Istanbul
(Hirst 2013: 47). Shub travelled to Ankara and marveled of the new city: ‘Nothing
reminds us that we are in Asia’ (p. 48). B. S. Arkanov, assistant director for the Bolshoi
Theatre, along with Dmitrii Shostakovich, David Oistrakh and Maria Maksakova
performed twenty-three concerts in April 1935. Lev Shteinberg collaborated with the
Turkish national symphony and performed classical concerts (p. 49). Lenfilm released
Serdtse Turtsii – Ankara (The Heart of Turkey – Ankara) a joint-collaboration SovietTurkish documentary film on the new capital of Turkey (p. 49). Natan Zarkhi and
Sergei Iutkevich’s ‘Chelovek, kotoryi ne ubil’ (The Man Who Did Not Kill) was a
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screenplay dramatizing Soviet-Turkish solidarity against the threat of imperialist Europe
in the early 1920s (p. 50). Reciprocally—like Kropotkin’s ‘mutual aid’—Moscow
hosted and exhibited Turkish culture; painters and the work of Abidin Dino (p. 51).
Linke observed Turkish and Russian flags hung side by side at the concert.
Silhouettes of Lenin and Atatürk faced each other on opposite sides of the room. She
questioned Bay Şükrü about the Soviet-Turkish alliance. With a confident air he stated:
‘Oh, the Russians are our best friends—so long as they keep their hands off our internal
politics. We are learning a lot from them, but we don’t want to follow in their footsteps’
(AD 286). Recent scholarship on Soviet-Turkish collaboration by Hirst (2013) plays up
an anti-imperialist dimension in their cultural politics. Historians describe the ‘intense
interaction’ of two ‘ostentatious state visits’ a ‘pragmatic response to geopolitical
necessity’ (p. 33). Hirst adds: ‘Anti-western motifs permeated Soviet-Turkish
interactions in realms well beyond those defined by strategic and economic interests’ (p.
46). He claims Atatürk did ‘not trust western academics, who are infected by a
condescension and dismissiveness toward Turkey’ (p. 48). The scientific gaze of Hirst
sharply contrasts Linke’s ‘tender empiricism’. Turkey was ‘prepared to learn from
anyone’ in the words of Fazıl but must ‘keep their hands off our internal politics’ in the
words of Şükrü. While Hirst’s article centers mostly on film and art, he had nothing to
add about industry, other than one sentence listing two projects (p. 52). Hirst’s study is
devoid of concrete insight into how the Turks and Soviets collaborated. Thanks to
Linke, we can understand that Mustafa Kemal and his peers did not bear hatred toward
any culture. Pragmatists, they were happy to borrow ideas from everyone. We might
view their practice in the vein of Kropotkin’s ‘mutual aid’. But due to the belligerent
clash between Anglo-American and German ‘national interests’, one cannot blame
Mustafa Kemal and his peers for taking early precautions after 1929. Hence, their wise
decision to welcome an exiled Trotsky from 1929 to 1933 on Büyükada; one of the
Princess Islands near Istanbul. They shared an anti-imperialist view but were not ‘antiWestern’, as Hirst imagines.
On Bay Şükrü’s suggestion, Linke met the mayor (vali) of Izmir, Kâzım Dirik
(AD 289). He made an immediate impression on her. ‘His genial flow of language, his
temperament and demeanour were more those of a Southern Frenchman than of a
Turkish general, and he seemed almost anxious to make me forget his military past’
(AD 290). Recent scholarship (Dirik 2008) summarizes his military and civic life a
success with special regard for his talents in sorting out arduous, delicate internal affairs
requiring tender negotiation and common sense. Dirik (1881-1941) was born in the
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Ottoman city of Manastır (Macedonia). He trained in the military academy (1897-1900)
fought in the Balkan War, WWI and in the War of Independence, leaving the army in
1928 (p. 227). Dirik was assigned key posts across Anatolia in Konya (1921-22), Bitlis
(1924-26), Izmir (1926-1935) and Thrace (1935-1941). Of these posts, Konya and Bitlis
were the most sensitive. Konya was a stronghold of religious Dervish leaders of whom
some were not keen on relinquishing authority to the Republic. Rather than using force,
Dirik spoke to their dignity to win them over with respect. He regularly visited senior
Mevlana Dervish, Mehmet Ruhi Dede, a well-respected poet and preacher figure in the
Konya religious community (p. 156). Despite the closure of Dervish Lodges by the
government in 1925, Dirik cultivated a respectful and responsible relationship with their
leaders. Dirik strongly supported education. Due to widespread poverty, an effect of the
war, many school children had no proper clothes. Hilmi Erdim, a schoolteacher from
Konya, explained Dirik’s actions to help the children attend school with dignity.
With a modest budget, uniforms were ordered for about fifty boarding students at the high
school. Fabric for the uniforms was paid with this budget. But there were no tailors. Knowing
Kazım Dirik’s devotion to the schools, the training committee decided to ask for his help. In his
headquarters at the gendarmerie school, upon listening to my request, and before humbly
escorting this 25-year-old teacher to the door, he said: “The people are evaluated by their minds
but accepted by their garments. So, it is our binding duty to obtain proper uniforms for these
children.” And in fifteen days the uniforms for our fifty children were sewn, with utmost care, in
the military workshop (p. 157).
Such action built trust in local religious leaders to the good will of Turkey’s leaders.
Dirik’s post in Bitlis coincided with the Sheikh Said Rebellion (Şeyh Sait İsyan)
that occurred between August 1924 and March 1926. The Law of Maintenance of Order
(1925) was put in place to quell the rebellion. Dirik’s correspondence offers a counternarrative to Robinson (1951) and Zürcher (1994: 187), as good intentions of the state.
The rioting was not shaped by being a Turk or Kurd, but was seemingly driven by the Sharia,
Caliphate and Sultanate movements, that eroded the Republic from within in the attempt to play
one off against the other as two opponents. (The propaganda that Sheikh Said’s son-in-law
Sheikh Abdullah, who conquered Varto two nights ago, spread across the Muş plains in the last
week declared: ‘There’s no Islam without a Caliph or Caliphate)’ (2008: 164).
For instance, in the south east of Turkey it was noted: ‘In Bitlis province and its
vicinity, there’s no such lack of commitment to the supreme Republic and the noble
Ghazi, this is proven by the unrivalled levels of peace, calm and safety there’ (p. 165).
They worked to ensure attention (şefkat) was given to the predominately Kurdish region
of Bitlis to dissuade them from becoming enemies of the Turks. ‘Despite, propaganda
attempts for a rebellion in provinces like Bitlis, where the majority of the people are
Kurds, the Turkish State’s affection to the local people dissuaded Kurds from enmity
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toward the Turks’ (p. 165).
One of Dirik’s initiatives during his post in Izmir included the 9 September
Exhibition (9 Eylül Sergi) titled Rebirth of a City out of Ashes (Küllerinden Doğan
Şehir) that promoted small local businesses (p. 217). Success of the exhibition led to the
Izmir International Fair (İzmir Enternasyonal Fuarı) that opened in September 1933 in
time to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Republic. Linke’s accurate use of
dates verifies she met Dirik before he left Izmir. In Thrace, Dirik was responsible for
sorting out the mix-up of populations from WWI and redistributing land. Due to the
break-up of the Balkan states, Bulgarian, Greek and Romanian Turks sought
repatriation to the motherland. Dirik formed cooperatives. A newspaper article
headlined: ‘Village Teachers are our General Staff: Three Hundred Sharp Youth
Working in Edirne Agricultural Garden’ (Dirik p. 251) is evidence of his project. Dirik
had worked for the same efficient ends in Izmir province, evident in his explanation to
Linke. ‘They are good hard working peasants, but rather quiet on the whole. However
since we attach them to already existing villages, they’ll soon mix with the native
population and feel at home with us’ (AD 292). He took her to the villages where these
changes were administered. Linke appeared skeptical. Sensing this Dirik added: ‘I know
this vilayet as I know my own house. I know every tree, every hut, every single peasant’
(AD 293). Accustomed to scepticism, he confessed the challenges involved with
changing old habits.
Until the Great War it was the Sultan and the Khalif who united them. The State—pah, they
thought of it only as an institution set up to rob them. We have to teach them now that the State
is their friend, in fact that they are the State, and that the State, at the same time, is something
more—a unity of millions, a power, a strength (AD 296).
On 9 September 1935, a program was scheduled to commemorate Dirik’s service to
Izmir. Students were preparing to partake in the event. Upon seeing Dirik, a young girl
jubilantly recited a poem. Linke noticed ‘tears were slowly welling up in his eyes’,
when she read the final line: ‘He lives in the people, and the people live in him’. Linke
confessed: ‘I knew no answer, but I envied him his certainty of calling in a new day’
(AD 298). The latter excerpt from the poem strikes me particularly reciprocal, in that,
what Mustafa Kemal and his peers gave to the people—an independent nation with a
populace who had the confidence and responsibility to make their own way within it—
resulted in equal effort of the people giving back to the nation, whatever their abilities.
The Turkish military as a ‘cultural’ rather than ‘modern institution’, as Altınay
proposes seems plausible, taking into account Linke’s experience of interconnectedness
213
between the engineers (civic leaders) and the military. Resembling Goethe’s scientific
method Linke’s way of seeing captured this reciprocity, whereas Altınay only saw the
military as a dominant culture of militarization and missed its progressive dimension as
an emancipatory force that worked for the betterment of the whole. The military has
forever been misunderstood in Turkey, as if her civilians are all militaristic. Lerner and
Robinson (1960) claimed: ‘Civilian supremacy had been maintained in Turkey because
the governing code of the Turkish Republic was founded upon the mystique of civilian
supremacy’ (p. 22). Rather than mystification her emancipatory praxis demystified
relations, clarifying them for her readers, as I articulated from Linke’s above narratives.
In sum, Linke endorsed what I see as a Turkish-style ‘Soviet of Technicians’.
The Turks coveted a spirit of insubordination, as did the Russians. Yet Linke’s
emancipatory praxis exposed ambiguousness. First, while west Turkey enjoyed formal
public discourse with the Soviets (Lenin’s bust alongside Atatürk), on the Russian
border Bolshevism was forbidden. In hindsight, this caused an unforeseen schism
between Communism proper and Turkey’s ‘third way’ in the populace. Second, while
the first Five-Year-Plan brought common good, lack of finances and WWII, forfeited
the promised second Five-Year-Plan in other regions desperate for development. Turkey
was unable to fully solve uneven and combined development. Third, those unable to
envision goals of the engineers or who still clung to superstition and ritual, differed
from the young like Nuri who embraced new habits and shirked off religion with humor
despite hardships. Fourth, the family metaphor for State may have inspired some but
hindered others to become independent thinkers, instead relying on Devlet Baba (State
Father). This was not the aim of Mustafa Kemal. Linke faced conservative views in the
peasantry. Not all embraced or understood the new habituation. Habits take time to
become habitual. Emboldened by the Turkish ‘spirit of insubordination’ she concluded:
‘Congratulations, my friends!’ (AD 324). Speaking at the Royal Academy (London)
Linke stated: ‘If left to work in peace, it is not impossible that they might succeed in
building up a modern State in which European civilisation is enlivened by bold
experiments and East and West are welded into a new whole’ (SCT 557).
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—Chapter 9—
In lieu of a Conclusion
Learning from Lilo
I still feel too much that the past never offered me the right
way, and that my life is still before me. Should a woman of
42 talk less foolishly? Perhaps, but it’s the only honest thing
I can say. —Lilo Linke, 1948118
The last thing to die is hope. —Yurii Shpilchak, 2015
Lilo lives on in common man merely looking for a ‘chance to live’. Today, Lilo would
be a Syrian, Afghani, Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan, Moroccan, Nigerian, Egyptian, Somali,
Serbian, Ukrainian and countless unfortunate souls about to join the ranks fleeing war.
War, this repetitious habit—repeated by those of alleged ‘exceptionalism’ and impunity
in their enterprise of ‘land-grabbing’ and armaments trade—seeks to destroy cultures
and human dignity across the globe. ‘Life is constituted in replication and evolution’
says Esther Leslie (2010). This may be so, but the question arises, how do we evolve?
Do we evolve for the better or the worse, and at whose expense?
Arriving in London in 2011 to begin my research work, few understood what
was special about Lilo; just an unsuccessful, little-known interwar writer. Pascal, on the
other hand, a former school teacher I met in 2013 living on the streets of Paris, sensed
who Lilo was. When I asked in London: ‘But, how are we going to live?’ they couldn’t
intuit why I was interested in this odd philosophical question. Fortunately, Esther Leslie
introduced Goethe’s scientific method that helped me frame this thesis in a fresh and
unexpected manner. Like Toni, who drew ideas for her thesis in 1915 by reading the
Frankfurter Zeitung (Stolper 1989: 61), I turned to corporate newscasts and events
unfolding in our world today. The word ‘predator’ no longer seemed a heavy-handed
term from Veblen. Researching the first half of the twentieth century combined with
what unfolded before my eyes daily, in newsprint and on screens, merged. My reading
of Veblen that man may be peaceable and industrious or predatory and war-like is
evident. This odd and little-known theoretician I fought dearly for, as my main frame,
118
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 25 November 1948 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
215
was indeed a wise choice. The infamous ‘phrase-makers’ from Barres’ ‘nationalisme’,
to Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’, are the repetition,
repeating. Once again their crude understanding of culture and civilization is used to
camouflage the clash of vested interests. Once again, common man has no chance in the
‘mad game’. Fred Magdoff (2006) proposed there is no ‘big idea’ as a catalyst for
twenty-first century capitalism like the automobile a century ago with its sub-categories;
oil industry, freeways, car parks, suburbs and so on. The ‘big idea’ today is the business
of war. Borrowing from business ideology—workers like wars—are outsourced.
Drawing near the close of this four-year project, I discovered it was likely
Gustav Stolper, and not Margaret Storm Jameson, who told Lilo to write down her
emotions. I understood this from Toni when Gustav began his love affair with Lilo.
Hurt and jealous but not innocent, Toni too, once had a love affair with Gustav when he
was married to his very bourgeois, Viennese wife Paula. In her memoir Toni wrote that
Gustav request she ‘begin then and there writing a full diary of events, of my thoughts,
emotions’ (1989: 90). Gustav was always open about his actions. ‘Lying, cheating,
hiding, was once again, as in 1915, quite beyond Gustav’s capabilities’, wrote Toni (p.
90). Thus, I intuit Gustav directed Lilo to do the same. This is of vital importance
because it shaped how Lilo would develop a writing style that included her thoughts and
emotions on small and substantial events experienced in dark days. Gustav found this
self-reflexive practice helpful for a person to solve their problems. But more than this, it
allows me today, to have a clearer understanding of what Lilo felt and how she reacted
to the tumultuous times she lived through. It confirms authenticity in the text, rather
than constructed fiction. Reading Lilo’s emotions can teach an earnest psycho-social,
cultural studies, humanities or sociology scholar much. For instance, her truthful stories
can teach how individuals are drawn to extremist movements; how individuals cope in
dark times of poverty and war; how to mobilize the Left or rather, understand why the
Left fails. Lilo’s narratives offer a science for life over manufactured, collected
knowledge used for domination. Lilo’s oeuvre may be considered a philosophy for
seeing anew peoples, cultures, nations, religions, as a ‘tender empiricist’—this woman’s
earnest travel toward her instinct for purposeful work. Rather than a ‘standard of living’
we might work for a ‘standard of loving’.
Human instinct for good intent is forever manipulated. Toni made this clear
when she wrote of the tactics that brought Hitler to power. He exploited and poisoned
democracy (1989: 90). Toni wrote:
216
These techniques again cannot be spelled out, but the main idea was infiltration. Every house,
every block, every region, had to have a centre of sworn Nazis. Every house. When at an early
stage of his upswing, he invented the Winterhilfe, a help for poor people in winter, this meant a
Nazi cell collecting gifts in every apartment and every house. Soon, nobody would know who
was watching him and who was collecting material which would force him to, go a certain way
or else. […] Hitler, in this way, built up a state within the state, complete with a financial system
of enforced contributions (p. 92-93).
Beyond the grand narrative of Hitler and Hitlerism, terms abused by Anglo-American
power to disguise their own tendencies for this propensity by blaming others of
yesteryear, Toni expressed not all Germans took a wrong turn. She attributes this to the
enormous mistake of talking of Nazi Germany as if it were the expression of one determined
majority, determined state. It as always the revolt of the worst, not of the average. ‘The Majority
of the German People?’, with a big question mark? ‘Why all these smart people lost, needs to be
described by a gifted historian: it was a technique of terror and of propaganda’ (p. 104).
Rather than consulting historians, I have consulted an evolutionary scientist (Veblen) to
respond to Toni’s request. Not in cultural history but in cultural evolution we find some
more concrete answers. Veblen knew ‘institutional selection’ differentiates between the
predatory and the peaceable, weeding out the latter, to hone and shape leaner, meaner
institutions. For Veblen the ideal is ‘a character which makes for peace, good-will and
economic efficiency, rather than for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud and mastery’
(1899/2009: 234). In capitalism, one embraces capitalist values—the spirit of money.
Who is Lilo Linke?
Lilo, in reality, was what I call a pre-refugee. I intuit this because of her
closeness to those who anticipated danger (Toni and Gustav), and managed to leave
Weimar before others were caught at borders, imprisoned or killed. If we insist on
categorizing her, in today’s context, she was both a refugee and economic migrant. She
would have never admitted this, because like Arendt, she rejected the term ‘refugee’.
Lilo wanted to live with dignity. If this meant travelling to do so, then travel was what
she had to do as a means of self-preservation. In France, for instance, she was forever
hounded, like others in her shoes, for their identity card.
The French are planning to increase the price of the Carte d’Identité to 220 francs. Foreign
refugees who return without permission after having been expelled from France, will be liable to
imprisonment from six months to two years—and expelled again after serving their sentence.
Damn it all, the English are more intelligent—they don’t let a poor refugee in from the very
beginning. If you have money—ah, that’s different. In that case they don’t bother whether you
are a Polish Jew or a nigger. […] I wonder what the Geneva committee will do about it.
Probably pass a resolution of sympathy, expect us to be grateful for it, and set up a further subcommittee to deal with the problem (CAV 262).120
120
Lilo uses ‘nigger’ sarcastically.
217
Terms like ‘traveler’ and ‘wayfarer’ used by literary critics don’t tell their readers much
about exactly how Lilo came to be a ‘wanderer’. Lilo already intuited nothing would
come out of the Left-Right polarization in Germany, except war. Marxists might view
her fleeing, a selling-out of the Left, a bourgeois Left liberal. Perhaps. Lilo cherished
and practiced a ‘somewhere on the Left’ Weltanschauung wherever the journey, for a
chance to live, took her. Lilo was not an idle traveller, paid by somebody. A generous
Gustav funded Lilo’s frugal journeys across France, Britain and later Turkey. And,
following Gustav’s death, when Lilo often ran out of money in Ecuador, Toni sent her
money. Linke notified Toni: ‘Your cheque arrived just wenn die Not am grossten’ (the
need was greatest).121 In Latin America, Lilo did travel the Andean nations and so here
we might call her a traveller. Yet, she was not a tourist, she travelled to learn and to
write. In this sense, it does make her a travel writer of sorts. But as she did social work
on her travels and wrote of these experiences, a more appropriate description for her is
an author of emancipatory pedagogy—autobiography as emancipatory pedagogy—the
title of this thesis. Lilo’s ‘spirit of insubordination’ instinct, explored in chapter four,
seems to have recovered or ‘saved’ her, such that restlessness was directed to work with
a purpose for good over the learned habits of pecuniary emulation and invidious
comparison of ‘imbecile institutions’.
I have concluded Lilo was a multi-perspectival person. She was the duck-rabbit
figure Bortoft used to depict Goethe’s way of seeing. A duck sometimes, a rabbit
another, but always both wrapped up in one. ‘I am a sincere friend of the Turks’, she
wrote in 1937 (AD 41). Lilo’s experiences, as a witness to Étatism were explored in the
three chapters of the Turkish case study, which I intuit as a genuinely, truthful story.
Wherever she went her workmanship was done with earnestness and love. It was not for
nothing Lilo spoke bravely in London, telling an audience, ‘if left to work in peace’
Turkey might ‘succeed in building up a modern State’ (SCT 557). I have witnessed
Turkey flourish as a successful modern Republic that lives in peace when not aroused
by foreign intervention.
In a letter to Toni in 1953, Lilo told of her ‘love’ for ‘investigating social
problems and writing about them in the paper’.122 Lilo also gave herself to the children.
Her creativity was endless for common good.
I have also started public performances of the puppet theatre, and am sending you a picture of
four of my 18 stars as a Christmas greeting (most of the puppets I modeled and dressed myself!):
121
122
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 26 December 1948 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 13 December 1953 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
218
Sr. Tralala Sabelotodo (Mr. Know-All), Dona Suciedad (Lady Filth) who dies a most horrible
death, Mr. Jabon (Soap), and Juan, the Indian. As you will gather, it’s a play about the need for
Hygiene. […] On Saturday’s, I have a children’s hour at the House of Culture here, to teach
some 200 poor boys and girls from the primary schools “artistic appreciation”: music, art,
literature, dance. It’s coming on very nicely.123
‘Man’s life is activity; and as he acts, so he thinks and feels’. I have tried to make the
point that a multi-perspectival position, afforded her a chance to evolve into a selffashioned, pre-cultural studies social scientist, prior to the emergence of cultural studies
as a discipline. Lilo is a pedagogue and an autobiographer, in that her stories try to
make sense of the world and the self in it. Veblen admitted such stories are seldom told.
History records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the triumph of imbecile
institutions over life and culture than of peoples who have by force of instinctive insight saved
themselves alive out of a desperately precarious institutional situation (1971: 312).
Perhaps in the way that Kazin fashioned Veblen both an artist and an analyst of his
time, Lilo seems to mirror Veblen’s approach to sorting out and solving the riddle of
how one should live. Saved out of a ‘desperately precarious institutional situation’, her
quest was to preserve the self as a ‘masterless man’.
What Did She Write?
I have given example after example how Linke’s authorship was not fiction. In
1932, Lilo traveled across France, but also stayed on the tiny island of Isle-de-Batz, off
the coast of Roscoff. Using her autobiography Tale Without End (1934) as a guide, in
2013, I traveled across France in search of Lilo’s trace. My findings prove her stories
are authentic. I met the Bellec family in Kerabandu, a region on the east side of Isle-deBatz whose inhabitants, were and still are, potato and cabbage farmers, fisherman and
small pension owners. Lilo wrote of a wedding she attended in the summer of 1932.
When I inquired about this wedding, the Bellec family (TWE 114), did indeed, confirm
their grandfather married that summer. I saw the family pension that Madame Joseph
Bellec, once generously opened to Lilo, despite their poverty. Lilo worked for the
Bellec’s on the field to earn her keep. Of her French journey she concluded:
IN ALL THESE MONTHS I HAD NEVER FELT ALONE; ALL people had been kind, all had
interested me. I had loved them all, although I had only caressed some children’s heads, only
kissed some women’s cheeks. Their simplicity, their joy of life, their sense of humour, their
courage and comradeship and loyalty had filled my heart with happiness. Every day had made
me rich. I had been quiet and peaceful and content and yet longing forward and farther. There
was no end to the journey (TWE 220).
123
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 17 December 1950 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
219
Regarding the authenticity of her social work, I turned to El Comercio. Despite
collecting newspaper clippings with the generous help of those working at the
Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit in Quito in 2012, I abstained from
reading them until near completion of the thesis. I chose this strategy as a method to
confirm whether her life and work stood up to my hypothesis. Here are my findings.
The headline on Monday 29 April 1963 declared Lilo died ‘yesterday’ on a
flight from Paris to London that would place her death on the 28 not 27 April, as
inscribed on her tombstone (Fig. 10). The newspaper article writes: ‘Always restless,
Lilo Linke took care of farmers, industry and problems of all kinds. […] While on a
campaign of progress for Ecuador, we are surprised by her death’.125 On Tuesday 30
April a full-page published on Lilo had much to say. One headline read: ‘Lilo Linke
was an indefatigable traveler to report on the reality of our country’ and explained:
She was endowed with sharp human insight. But not only her descriptions, but with earnest facts
and figures explaining the reality, especially her human contact based on courteous discussion
with all kinds of people in the most varied cultures and conditions. These dialogues are
irreplaceable and abound in her articles as a kind of vital plot, that without which, would be a
little dehumanized.
The writer praised Lilo generously, pointing out ‘hundreds of articles’ she had written
about the provinces with ‘unbiased observation of events’.
We have had and have great columnists, tough and brilliant journalists accurately interpret
national and international problems, but a prodigious writer of the national reality and its social
activities connected with their basic problems, no one has been more effective than Lilo Linke
among us.126
Another article wrote: ‘Lilo Linke was a writer appreciated throughout [Latin]
America’.127 Lilo was well-known for her social work as the following makes evident:
A campaign involving all agencies in the country and thousands of citizens who contributed
financially or with their own work, planted millions of trees. The engine driving the national
mass movement was Lilo Linke, who unfortunately died prematurely.128
Her extensive social work is more than adequately mentioned and highly regarded. It
shows her creativity and breadth of knowledge across many fields.
Another of her notable campaigns was sanitation. Before a smallpox epidemic, in order to finally
eradicate this evil, as evil yaws, malaria and other endemic diseases, Lilo Linke started an
advertising campaign which reinforced its own action, accompanying the vaccinators through
jungles and mountains, leading the inhabitants of the city and the provinces to the conclusion
125
Monday, 29 April 1963, El Comercio (Quito: Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit).
Tuesday, 30 April 1963, El Comercio (Quito: Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit).
127
Ibid.
128
Ibid.
220
126
that they should work with the Health organization and be vaccinated. Most of this fulfilled an
extensive, informative work about public health, dietetics and home economics.129
Obituaries and messages of condolence were printed by many including cooperatives
and the National Union of Journalists (La Unión Nacional de Periodistas). On Thursday
2 May, a small photograph with indigenous peasants holding a placard with Lilo
Linke’s name written on it was published. Camilo Miguel Sisa, a thirty-five year old
student at the ‘Lilo Linke’ school appeared in the photo. The article stated:
The school has forty-one male and female students. All are indigenous. The oldest student is
Leonidas Socaj who is forty-three and the youngest a six-year old Santiaguito Paca. The “Lilo
Linke” School is in the group of schools that leads for its organization and performance. Miss
Lilo Linke was very interested in “their” Radio School, sending constant financial support and
reading material. At Christmas 1962, I was worried to send Christmas gifts to their students.
Students are treated with respect, dignity and loving affection.130
Thousands of peasants mourned Lilo,131 particularly students of The Popular Radio
School (Escuelas Las Radiofónicas Populares)132 for whom Lilo worked endlessly
despite her countless social projects. The small article concludes with these words as a
kind of philosophy about the Radio School: ‘Why we meet | Why we understand | Why
we love’.133 Here, then is evidence of Paulo Freire’s ‘dialog of love’. This stands, in my
regard, for what should define a genuine traveller—richness born from the fortunate
encounter and the consequent reciprocal exchange between them.
There is no way of knowing who Anne was, Lilo’s first fortunate encounter as
a young adolescent, but she must have made a substantial impression on her. Chapter
three discussed her fortunate encounters. The times she lived in also directed her, living
amidst jobless, angry common man taking to the streets to change the situation which
had caused empty stomachs. The Trade Union for Shop and Office Employees,
followed by Gustav, whom I believe was a pivotal figure in shaping her life as he did
Toni’s, then Margaret in London, followed by countless others, were her guides. Souls
searching for a way to live in the darkness attracted Lilo. In Paris she met a Madam
Compan, probably a wealthy woman judging by the title ‘Madam’. Compan took Lilo
to some of the poorest neighborhoods including the ‘Zone’ in central Paris near the
city’s defensive walls where slums had begun to spring up, home to the most destitute
immigrants Armenians, negroes, Poles, Italians and Chinese. Compan set up a welfarecenter to help their children. Lilo wrote of Madam Compan and her actions: ‘Her own
129
Tuesday, 30 April 1963, El Comercio (Quito: Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit).
Thursday, 2 May 1963, El Comercio (Quito: Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit).
131
Ibid.
132
The school Escuela Fiscal Mixta Lilo Linke in Calerdon, north Quito replaced the Radio School.
133
Thursday, 2 May 1963, El Comercio (Quito: Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit).
221
130
misery melted away if she held it near to the hell of all the suffering she saw’ (TWE 90).
This is telling, for it is by helping others one helps the self, mutual aid in the Kropotkin
sense, to maintain a sense of human dignity in times of darkness. Or, in the way Freire
thought one cannot be free when another is not. This ‘knowing’ of the reality brings a
larger knowledge of how to live. In an unorthodox Deweyian sense, it is continuity of
knowledge that brings ‘emancipation and enlargement of experience’ (1910/2007: 156).
Thus Lilo’s fortunate encounters add, one after the other, to her ‘infinite development’
in the Goethean sense. Fortunate encounters in Turkey expanded into more encounters
in Latin America.
The questions laid out at the beginning of the thesis, seem to test true based on
my findings of Lilo’s rich social work and corpus of authorship. Lilo did evolve from a
‘self-regarding’ individual to ‘other-regarding’ person on a journey out of darkness to
embrace hope, as articulated in chapter two. Lilo might well have been self-centric.
Judging from Toni’s first impressions on meeting her, it seems so.
She was all a Berlin poster picture could hope to show in her early twenties, slim, long-legged,
with bold, expressive features, the bluest eyes, an ample bob of golden blond hair. And she was
ready to dare anything for the sake of LIFE spelled large, including intelligence, imagination,
plus a strong trait of narcissism (1989: 89-90).
Erich Fromm taught narcissism originates in the economic and political structures of
authoritarian regimes and is not an inherent pathological trait, as Freud would have it.
Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) articulated North American society was also of this type
because other than mass consumerism there were few fruitful possibilities to live and
create, in a culture with ‘diminishing expectations’ (1979). Knowing my social culture
from a distance (Canada), I see the validity of his premise, in that, I now understand
why it was, I too fled from and found, solace and contentment in another culture
(Turkey), that had not yet reached the saturation point of narcissism in 1990.
Here, I intuit and conclude, based on Lilo’s praxis in Ecuador and across the
Andean nations, as she had a ‘genuine’ interest in Ecuador’s development, so too, she
had a genuine interest in Turkey’s development. She thought, in the vein Veblen did,
that industry helps a culture and nation evolve. But the difference lies in who controls
industry and for what purposes. The so-called Turkish ‘elites’ at the inception of the
Republic, up until WWII, had made the experiment of Étatist industrialization in a
mixed economy, their benchmark to maintain national sovereignity, such that future
generations would flourish. Lilo was a helping hand in this, in her support for their
efforts. Where Turkey suceeded Weimar failed. A progentior of social justice, Lilo’s
efforts were endless. ‘We had failed, probably because we had asked and given too
222
much at the same time too little. Not everyone knows what to do with liberty’ (AD 72).
The Close of her Journey
In 1952, she wrote Toni that ‘President Galo Plaza, [is] a faithful reader of my
newspaper articles’.137 Plaza was president of Ecuador from 1948 to 1952. Lilo affected
people and events. She wrote to Toni full of excitement: ‘I decided to go to Bolivia after
the people I wrote about in Andean Adventure got back into power. They gave me a
front seat to watch the revolution now in progress. It was fascinating, especially since I
was not obliged to identify myself with anyone or anything’. This clarifies Lilo’s
writing brought action and social change in the region but also points to her impartiality
in not taking a side and her determination to remain a ‘masterless man’. Her satisfaction
is great but admits: ‘No money in writing!’138 No matter how gifted and persistent Lilo
was in creating a Weltanschauung of ‘what ought to be’, gradually across the 1950s the
situation in Ecuador began to change.
Lilo wrote Toni at the end of December 1953 that her chances to continue her
work were ‘snatched from me from one moment to the next’.139
[T]he Ecuadorian government closed the biggest Quito daily, EL Comercio, a respectable
bourgeois paper if ever there was one. We are moving more and more towards a Fascist regime,
and the government’s hostility towards this and other papers and institutions is just one of the
many things that thicken, or rather darken, the atmosphere. For someone like you and me who
remember so vividly even after twenty years what happened in 1932 and 1933, history repeats
itself with frightening precision.
In her letters it becomes evident that the vested interests of the United States were
slowly impinging on Ecuador, thus limiting and curbing possibilities for building
democracy in the nation. In 1955, she wrote ‘the government signed a contract with an
American firm to run a tourist and industrial propaganda campaign for this country in
the States, and I have been doing some well-paid journalistic work for them’.140 For the
first time Lilo had a bit of money. I can only speculate the reason for her decision lies in
the fact choices were narrowing for those with good intentions to help Ecuador develop.
Institutions caught up with her. Lilo grew increasingly apprehensive about planning a
future, but attempted to do so nevertheless. She continued in the same letter to Toni:
I hope to get a mortgage loan from the Social Insurance and start building a house. The funny
thing is that a Socialist friend was the one who tried hardest to persuade me—I never aimed at
such “capitalist” things as becoming a house-owner. Still, it is probably wise. What worries me a
137
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 11 November 1952 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 6 October 1952 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
139
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 13 December 1953 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
140
Letter to Toni Stolper from Lilo Linke, 6 May 1955 (NY: Leo Baeck Institute).
223
138
little is that we have a Falangist-inspired group here which is rapidly gaining more influence
thanks to the absurd fondness of our crazy President for this group, and we have had some rather
hectic times again of late, with illegal imprisonments, beatings-up of a well-known journalist...
Lilo’s thinking on ownership is a telling one because it leads me to conclude she did not
have a ‘capitalist’ mindset toward ownership. Her statement is an interesting find,
because it was Veblen who saw unfettered ‘pecuniary gain’ the malaise of humanity. In
her case, a home was a form of security with the anticipation of old age; ownership
Veblen condoned because common man needs the basic necessities of life to flourish.
Lilo travelled to Europe and Israel in 1963 (Holl 1987: 84). Apparently on this
journey Lilo died of heart failure (p. 89 fn 113) on a flight from Athens to London (p.
84). Toni and Margaret were just as perplexed as Franziska (Rolly) Becker, ‘… no one
knows why she flew back, she was on her way to Germany, was not expected until
much later, in London, there is no one called…’ (p. 89 fn 113). Holl notes Lilo’s body
was not returned for six months from London to Ecuador until 22 November 1963, the
day her friends remember Kennedy was assassinated (p. 84). In Quito, I met J who told
me about 1963. Anticipating a coup d’état, many intellectuals had to suddenly flee, as
far off as China and India. When I mentioned visiting Lilo’s grave, J responded: ‘Is that
where she is?’141 A distant relative told me Lilo’s belongings were confiscated accept
for two newspaper articles and a set of encyclopedias left in her home.142 Lilo’s journey
ended as it begun, in violence.
The first of May 1963 in Ecuador was active, with revolution in the air.
Headlines the following day in El Comercio show common man marched with banners
that read ‘Viva el 1 mayo y la unidad de trabajador’ (Long Live May 1, workers unite)
and ‘Tierra o muerte’ (land or death). Over fifty-two unions marched.143 A professor of
Political Science at the University of Michigan wrote a report on Ecuador titled
Anatomy of a Coup d’Etat: Ecuador 1963. ‘On July 11, 1963, a battalion of the Azuay
mechanized regiment surrounded and occupied the Palacio del Gobierno, the residence
and place of work of Ecuador’s Presidents, situated in the heart of Quito. Another in the
long series of changes by violence which has marked the history of Ecuador had begun’,
wrote Needler (p. 1). According to this expert, there were four ‘discrete motives’ for the
coup: ‘to remove a drunkard from office, to conduct structural reforms, to act more
strongly in repressing Communism, and to prevent the return to office of Velasco
Ibarra’ (p. 2). ‘[O]ne of the most acute interpreters of Ecuadorean reality to the English 141
Interview in J’s Quito home, 28 May 2012.
One reports a small plane crash in the Amazon. The other reports a corpse in the Amazon River.
143
Thursday, 2 May 1963, El Comercio (Quito: Biblioteca Ecuatoriana Aurelio Espinosa Pólit).
224
142
speaking world, the late Lilo Linke’, Needler wrote, continued his analysis with a quote
of her opinion on the Ecuadorean army:
For all these reasons, it is now assumed in Ecuador that the army will continue to abstain from
politics and limit itself to the defense of the Constitution and, of course, of the country should
Ecuador be attacked (Linke cited in Needler, p. 3).
Such resistance was not what the vested interests in the United States calculated for
Ecuador. Needler draws attention to ‘individual self-interest’ on behalf of certain
participants involved, like Ecuadorean politicians, but exposes the affair when he
concludes: ‘Foreign influences on all of the military services emanate now
predominantly from the United States’ (p. 36).
How did Turkey evolve? Following Atatürk’s death 10 November 1938, and
owing to the fear of WWII and its possible outcomes, Étatism became more rigid.
Bureaucrats discouraged private enterprise and forced state monopolies (Özay p. 52).
Okyar articulates that during WWII large-scale inflation and hoarding of gold enabled a
few private enterprises and businessmen to accumulate great wealth, almost overnight
(1965: 107). For instance, Prime Minister İsmet İnönü was quoted as saying: ‘“We are
creating 15-20 millionaires in every district.” This made a very bad impression and left
the suspicion that the whole object of the Government was to enrich a small minority’
(p. 108). Following WWII, by the 1950s a bourgeoisie had been formed. This pitted the
Étatists (Devletçi) against the free enterprisers (hususi teşehbüsçü) now divided into
new classes; ‘businessmen class, a middle class of tradesmen and artisans and finally a
class of labourer’ (p. 106). A severely impoverished Anatolia awaited Marshall Plan
financial aid. Multi-party elections were held in 1950. While an era of work for
common good appears to have closed, it would take three military coup d’état (1960,
1971, 1980) to undermine the peoples’ spirit of insubordination. Turkey has grown
exponentially as a capitalist power. Not until post-2001 were all state-run industries
either shut down or privatized. Moris Farhi in his recent novel Young Turk sincerely
wrote: ‘Atatürk must rage in his grave every time he hears his name so misused and
debased’ (2007: 430).
Home truth five: You went like water. Now come back like water.144
Çiğdem Esin remarks of her research project: ‘I have experienced my own
political and ethical tensions in doing this research’ (2008: 85). This led me to consider
mine. Living at the receiving end of imperialism offers quite a different experience than
144
Farhi 2007: 436
225
living at the sending end. Lilo’s workmanship and my interpretation of her work, from a
privileged position as both an insider and outsider to Turkish culture, humbly offers
Erfahren, a ‘knowing’. One must ‘go and live’ in a new society (Jameson cited in
McLoughlin 2007: 110). Turkey has provided me an alternative habituation from which
to understand my former one. The people of Turkey are my best teachers, as is Lilo.
Near the close of this thesis, I listened to words of wisdom from Jerome Bruner
at New York University in an on-line interview titled: ‘How does teaching influence
learning’ (2014)? I draw from his wisdom. Teaching ‘opens the world’. He counsels:
‘If it’s only about the past, like old-fashioned historians used to think it, it gets you
nowhere except back to the past’. ‘It’s the business of going beyond’. Perhaps this is
one of the main reasons I chose to write cultural evolution, not cultural history. ‘Culture
is a way of knowing. It’s a way of knowing that relates to the constraints imposed by a
certain way of life’. Culture is education. And it is about reciprocity. ‘It’s impossible for
somebody to interview someone without them interviewing them back’. I considered
Lilo in relation to Bruner’s wisdom: ‘To use your being to its fullest extent’.
Lilo is a pedagogue for me and hopefully for others. Rather than coldness and
melancholy, she taught me empathy and ethics. She taught about responsibility toward
others and the self. In 2014, I directed my priorities to a distant relative from the
Ukraine, over writing-up this dissertation because, instinctively, it was right thing to do.
Margaret embraced Lilo and countless others fleeing war in the same manner looking
for nothing but a ‘chance to live’. Yurii, little different from Lilo, was full of hope. I
learned living in fear is counterproductive. It leaves one open to coercion. Lilo taught
me hope in dark times. She taught me a multi-perspectival way of seeing. And most
importantly, Lilo taught me that concrete action, together with reflection through
writing is the true way to know the self. Following her trace and writing up this thesis
has done that. She reignited my curiosity about what it means to ‘be’ rather than just
‘exist’. Two words adequately sum up the totality of my experiences: ‘Yaşamadan
bilemezsin’—(You don’t know until you live it).
226
Appendix She Who Laughed
Fig 1. Lilo Linke, Tale Without End (1934) New York: Alfred A. Knopf
227
Fig. 2 Heinz and Lilo Linke, east Berlin (approximate date 1910)
With permission, Marc Linke
Fig. 3 Paul Linke
With permission, Marc Linke
Fig. 4 Lucie Linke,
With permission, Marc Linke
228
Fig. 5 Lilo Linke in Quito, Ecuador (1952) Photograph Rolf Blomberg
With permission, Felipe Fried
Fig. 6 Lilo Linke, Quito, Ecuador (1957)
With permission, Marc Linke
Fig. 7 She Who Laughed, Magic Yucatan (1950)
London: Hutchinson & Co.
229
Fig. 8 Escuela Fiscal Mixta Lilo Linke, Calderón, Quito, Ecuador (2012) Photograph Anita Oğurlu
Fig. 9 Student, Photograph Anita Oğurlu
Fig. 10 El Batán Cemetery, Quito, Ecuador
(2012) Photograph Anita Oğurlu
230
Fig. 11 High School Girls, Allah Dethroned (1937) London: Constable & Co.
Fig. 12 My Friends and I at Erzincan
Allah Dethroned (1937)
231
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